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A friend asked for comment on “How the FAA Shot Down ‘Uber for Planes'”. The proposed service would have allowed people to find a pilot heading for Martha’s Vineyard, for example, and hop on, paying his or her proportional share of the expenses, e.g., the flight school rental fee.

My response via Facebook was

The FAA tries to draw a sharp line between airlines, which they want to be 100% safe, and personal flying, where they let you build your own plane in your garage and then fly it yourself. They don’t want to put non-pilots in the position of having to judge if an operation is sufficiently safe. I think that perhaps there should be a middle ground. Require that there be a two-pilot crew, for example, which is the cornerstone of airline safety. Also require a higher level of insurance and that the pilots comply with the insurance company’s training requirements. The rest of the charter/airline regulations are not as important in my opinion.

(The FAA does have a track record of innovating in rule-making. It created the Light Sport Aircraft and Sport Pilot regulations, for example, to simplify two-seat visual flying. It took “more than a decade of deliberation” (see http://generalaviationnews.com/2013/09/09/a-new-approach-to-lsa-certification/ ))

What do readers think? On the one hand it would be nice if adults could meet over the Internet and do something that is already legal if they were to meet face-to-face. On the other hand, if you have never met someone face-to-face how can you evaluate his or her ability to be the single pilot of an aircraft?

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A working mom friend sent me “How to Fix Feminism”, a recent New York Times piece that opens with

Over the past half-century, unmarried childless women have overcome every barrier to opportunity you can think of, and now earn 96 percent of what men do. Mothers, on the other hand, aren’t doing nearly as well: Married mothers are paid 76 cents on the dollar.

One argument is for a central planning ministry to step in:

Here’s a fantasy my daughter and I entertain: What if child-rearing weren’t an interruption to a career but a respected precursor to it, like universal service or the draft? Both sexes would be expected to chip in, and the state would support young parents the way it now supports veterans. This is more or less what Scandinavian countries already do. A mother might take five years off, then focus on her career, at which point the father could put his on pause. Or vice versa.

(Let’s see how enthusiastic that daughter is about Scandinavian laws and policies after she has sex with a married dermatologist and needs to choose between receiving $100,000/year tax-free for 21 (New York) or 23 years (Massachusetts) versus a Danish maximum of $8,000 per year.)

Fresh from a Girl Scout overnight camping trip (don’t ask), I wonder why the focus on what people get paid on a W-2 instead of on what they can spend? Some stay-at-home moms drove up to the event in $70,000 SUVs. Their W-2 earnings were “0 cents on the dollar” compared to anyone with a job, but their spending power was obviously far above the median. Is the life goal to have an impressive 1040 return or a comfortable material lifestyle?

If feminists who identify as “women” can’t be happy without a W-2 that precisely matches that of American workers who currently identify as “men,” why not let citizens pay each other? In a currently heterosexual couple, for example, the person who identifies as a man could provide a weekly paycheck, perhaps at the state of residence’s current child support guideline rates, for “caregiving” and deduct that from “his” income for tax purposes. The person who identifies as a woman would then receive an additional W-2 for this caregiving and thus end up with a taxable income that equals or exceeds the “man.” If there are gender changes within the household the arrangements can be altered, potentially on a monthly basis. (Note that this is not quite the same, cashflow-wise, as actual court-ordered child support. Child support revenue is not taxable for the winner parent nor deductible for the loser parent. Jessica Kosow, the University of Pennsylvania graduate who outearns her classmates 3.2:1 based on a four-year marriage, would be considered an impoverished single mother by the measures put forward in this NYT article because her W-2 earnings are $0.)

Readers: What do we think? Is it time to heal this rift in our society by just having people within a household actually pay each other for perceived caregiving value? (Also, I didn’t check the 1000+ comments on this article, but do any of the readers point this out? Or do people just accept that W-2 wages is the correct measure?)

Related:

• Gender equity should be measured by consumption, not income?
• Discussion of feminism in the Rationale chapter
• “Women now control more than half of US personal wealth, which ‘will only increase in years to come'” (Business Insider, 2015): “About 51 percent, or $14 trillion, of American personal wealth is now controlled by women, according to the Bank of Montreal’s Wealth Institute. The Canadian bank also expects them to control about $22 trillion by 2020. .. This sea change has come as women have also moved to fill 52 percent of management, professional and related positions in the country, according to BMO.”

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In 2010 I wrote about the Icon A5, a seaplane that would go into production in 2011 and therefore start delivering a return to its investors in 2011. The airplane was quasi-certified in 2015, but now it seems that the payback for all of that design engineering investment won’t begin until 2017 at the earliest because that’s when production will start. Flying Magazine says that they are looking to raise more money…

The company was founded/funded in 2006 (Wikipedia), so that’s a minimum of 11 years from first funding to first profits.

Amber Heard got there in about one year, with a boost from a domestic violence allegation. Google got there in about four years (Wikipedia says it was a research project in 1996 and then started selling ads in 2000). Icon is on a timeline similar to that of Diavik, “surveyed in 1992 … with production [of diamonds] commencing in January 2003,” but without the diamonds…

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Under the “it takes a lot of courage to condemn a convicted rapist” principle, my Facebook friends are complaining about what they feel to be the insufficient punishment meted out to Brock Turner (strictly speaking, he was not tried for or convicted of “rape,” though the New York Times and other national media refer to him as a “rapist”). His family probably spent roughly $1.5 million on a criminal defense (source of estimate). Unless he emigrates he will spend a lifetime as a third-class citizen on the sex offender registry. He will be in prison for up to six months (this latter punishment being the focus of public outcry).

As I was not in the courtroom hearing the evidence it is not for me to say whether or not justice was served. (And people who are outraged that he didn’t get the maximum sentence possible should review Langbein’s “Torture and Plea Bargaining” to learn how today’s maximum sentences relate to what were considered fair sentences pre-1960.) However, I think that nearly everyone would agree that, without alcohol having been consumed by both criminal and victim, at least this particular crime would not have occurred.

The politically acceptable point of view seems to be that we should change the behavior of drunken men, e.g., with harsher punishments for bad behavior while drunk. I wonder how successful that can be, though, given that there are already harsh punishments, mostly practical but also criminal justice-related, for bad behavior while drunk and yet humans continue to drink when alcohol is available and behave badly when drunk.

What about Prohibition? It didn’t work very well 100 years ago, but the modern police state is much more sophisticated. Americans are packed much more tightly together and subject to more surveillance. Getting truckloads of alcohol across the border from Canada doesn’t seem as practical today as it was in 1920.

There are a lot of reasons why Prohibition could make more sense today than it did in 1920.

In 1920 if a person suffered health problems due to alcohol consumption the cost of treatment and disability fell on the individual and his or her family. Today, through a combination of Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, and SSDI, most of those costs will fall on taxpayers. Society thus has a more compelling interesting in prevent residents from drinking than it did in 1920.

In 1920 the government had debts that were minimal by today’s standards. The government was not obligated to pay large pensions to former public employees. There was no Social Security or Medicare. Headline bond debt was not at 100 percent of GDP. If Americans didn’t work at maximum efficiency the consequence was slower economic growth, not insolvency. Americans would have to work productively pretty close to 24/7 to pay off all of today’s obligations. Given the lack of productivity of drunk people, it seems intuitively obvious that we would have a larger economy and therefore pay more in taxes if none of us ever drank (except when traveling to foreign countries). [See link below, though, for a posting questioning this common sense idea.]

In 1920 the U.S. did not have a significant Muslim population whose religious principles prohibit alcohol consumption.

In 1920 there was a reasonably high percentage of jobs where consuming alcohol wouldn’t affect performance too much. Today even a slight mistake with a computer can cost the employer a fortune (21st century draft horse posting) and massive litigation costs can be incurred after missteps (you’ll never believe what happens when the rushed workers at Panera try to fill an order for grilled cheese that contains two comments regarding peanuts).

Could it make sense to prohibit alcohol when various U.S. states are in the process of legalizing marijuana? If alcohol is more likely to lead to stuff that society no longer wishes to tolerate, I don’t see why it would be inconsistent to ban alcohol while freeing the stoners to do as they please.

[Of course you could argue that preventing people from drinking alcohol takes away their liberty, but it seems that Americans are long past the point where liberty per se is a concern.]

Related:

• Why can’t a country’s productivity be predicted by alcohol consumption?
• How do people mix alcohol and skiing?
• Alcoholism = stepping stone to success (plus why we must all move to Switzerland)
• “Drummer Defends Stanford Student Convicted in Rape Case. Her Band Pays a Price.” (nytimes) — report on some collateral shrinkage of the economy

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A friend’s daughter graduated from Harvard this year and the family threw her a party. I learned that Harvard Hillel is now a safe space from everything except diabetes…

 

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A reader sent an AP story in the Miami Herald: “Websites connect college students with ‘sugar daddies’ willing to pay the bill”. What I found most interesting is that a woman was willing to go on record with a name (changed here to “Joyce Carefree” in case she someday changes her mind) that potential employers might be Googling:

[Joyce Carefree] graduated from law school debt-free this spring, thanks to a modern twist on an age-old arrangement.

During her first year, she faced tuition and expenses that ran nearly $50,000, even after a scholarship. So she decided to check out a dating website that connected women looking for financial help with men willing to provide it, in exchange for companionship and sex — a “sugar daddy” relationship as they are known.

Now, almost three years and several sugar daddies later, [Carefree] is set to graduate from Villanova University free and clear, while some of her peers are burdened with six-digit debts.

The domestic violence angle is also interesting:

Kristen Houser of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center says that violence is common any time money is exchanged for sex. “You need to pay attention that there is a power imbalance,” she said.

The same organization says in a factsheet that “one in five women … will be raped” and “46.4% lesbians, 74.9% bisexual women and 43.3% heterosexual women reported sexual violence other than rape during their lifetimes.” Unless the organization also thinks that a substantial percentage of women are sex workers, it would seem that sexual violence is also “common” for women who engage in unpaid interactions with men. So the choice for a woman is really between paid versus unpaid rape and “sexual violence other than rape”?

Readers: Does the fact that [Joyce Carefree] is willing to go public with this at the beginning of her career as an attorney indicate that there has been a significant shift in mores?

Related:

• Where New York Times readers don’t want to follow Europe: Legalized prostitution

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People who can get cash without working usually work less. The Redistribution Recession looks at the aggregate effect on the U.S. economy when the government offers people taxpayer-funded benefits on condition that they not work. Real World Divorce looks at how aggressively Americans will pursue alimony and child support, both of which can be more lucrative when a plaintiff refrains from working. What about PhD academics who have chosen a life in the Ivory Tower because of a deep passion for knowledge? It turns out that if they can get cash without working hard they respond in the same way as a public housing occupant or child support profiteer: “Why Do We Tenure? Analysis of a Long Standing Risk-Based Explanation” (Brogaard, et al). See the Abstract:

Using a sample of all academics that pass through top 50 economics and finance departments between 1996 and 2014, we study whether the granting of tenure leads faculty to pursue riskier ideas. We use the extreme tails of ex-post citations as our measure of risk and find that both the number of publications and the portion that are “home runs” peak at tenure and fall steadily for a decade thereafter. Similar patterns holds for elite (top 10) institutions, for faculty with longer tenure cycles, and for promotion to Full Professorship. We find the opposite pattern among poorly-cited publications: their numbers steadily rise after tenure. The decline in both the quantity and quality of publications points to tenure incentivizing less effort in publishing rather than more risk-taking.

From within the paper:

it appears that academics can exert effort toward both quantity and quality, and reduce both post-tenure.

We attribute the decline in the quantity and quality of research output post-tenure to a reduction in effort incentives, but the threat of termination is by no means the only incentive that academics face. To find support for our explanation, we consider another publicly observable event around which there is likely to be a significant change in incentives: the promotion to Full Professor. Full Professorship is often associated with a substantial increase in pay, as well as rights to contribute to university decision-making. We therefore expect a similar effect of promotion to Full Professor on the number and quality of publications. We find that the number of publications per year rises until two years prior to a professor attaining the rank of Full Professor, and falls steadily over the next 12 years. The same pattern is apparent for the number of home runs per year. The percentage decrease in each variable is nearly identical to the post-tenure period, and doubly significant.

Related:

• The public schoolteacher on incentives to work hard

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Six different readers emailed with news of Ellen Pao’s book project. This answers to some extent the question that I asked in “Ellen Pao’s new job?” (but it does cast some doubt on the merits of her lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins; if she were in fact a competent venture capitalist and therefore had sufficient skills to beat the S&P 500 by investing in young companies, why wouldn’t she have been snapped up by some greedy investors looking for yield?) It comes close to answering What should Ellen Pao’s forthcoming book be titled? (July 2015)

What I found most interesting in this Jezebel piece on Pao’s new book is the statement from the publisher: “one of the few visible, prominent women of color who have reached the C-suite in corporate America.”

The “corporate America” phrase is interesting because Reddit had roughly $8 million per year in revenue while Ms. Pao was CEO. By that revenue standard, the manager of three McDonald’s franchises would also qualify (Forbes) as a member of the corporate America C-suite. (Compare to Rosalind Brewer, responsible for $57 billion in sales at Sam’s Club.)

An Asian-American qualifying for the “women of color” category is yet more interesting because it shows the evolution of victimhood in our society. About 20 years ago a Korean-American friend was denied membership in a Harvard Law School Women of Color group. Today she would be able to join?

Title ideas from the July 2015 reader comments:

• From VCs to Reddit: How I exposed Silicon Valley sexism
• Pao! Right in the Kisser!
  The Sayings of Chairman Pao
  How to Get Ahead in Business without Really Trying
  How to Marry a Millionaire
  Mean In
  Rean In
• Pu$$y Warrior, Fighting White Male Patriarchy: the Ellen Pao Story

Related:

• Global douchebag circuit: Aspen Institute, Ellen Pao, and Buddy Fletcher
• Litigious Minds Think Alike: Divorce litigators react to the Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins lawsuit
• Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins wrap-up

 

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Folks:

I love my Trek electric bicycle and now a friend wants to get one. It seems that she must pay a minimum of about $2,800 if she wants to get a name-brand such as Trek or Specialized. The question for today is why. Back in 2009 Costco was selling electric bikes for $899. You can find Chinese-made electric bicycles retailing on Alibaba for $500-1000.

If we can go into a neighborhood bike store and buy a mainstream Trek for $440, why is the first rung of the electric bike ladder at $2000+? What is stopping Trek, Specialized, and Giant from throwing the electric components of a $500 Chinese electric bike onto one of their $440 bikes and selling the combination for under $1000?

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It seems that Hillary Clinton has been nominated by the Democrats (I predicted this result in April 2015). My friends on Facebook are going nuts about how this is somehow historic and will inspire American women and girls.

Can this be true? Isn’t part of Hillary’s message that you can’t get ahead in American society or in the American economy unless you are born to rich parents, are white, etc. If people believe that message, why would they be inspired by a woman who succeeded financially and politically by being married to the President? There are more than 150 million American women and girls yet only a handful of living past, current, and future Presidents of the U.S.

Readers: Do any of you who are parents of K-12 girls think that Hillary being President for 8 years will significantly affect the practical opportunities that are available to your daughters?

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