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One thing that I’ve noticed in talking to high school students from high-income families in which both parents have a lot of fancy degrees is that a lot of these young people want to major in “international relations” once they get to college. And in fact quite a few colleges offer this major (partial list; list of schools outside the U.S.).

This leads to the stupid question of the day: If so many people around the world are studying international relations, why are countries constantly fighting? (if not always in a shooting war then at least some sort of verbal conflict)

Slightly less stupid question: What do young people actually learn when they study “international relations”? Presumably they can’t get hands-on experience negotiating agreements!

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“How Society Pays When Women’s Work Is Unpaid” is an interesting New York Times article.

Cultural change is also important, [Melinda] Gates said.

She recalled being unhappy about the long commute to her oldest daughter’s preschool. Mr. Gates, then chief executive of Microsoft, said he would drive their daughter two days a week.

“Moms started going home and saying to their husbands, ‘If Bill Gates can drive his daughter, you better darn well drive our daughter or son,’ ” Ms. Gates said. “If you’re going to get behavior change, you have to role-model it publicly.”

In other words, she married a guy who brought $80 billion into the household, but ended up being unhappy with the division of labor in the household.

A subtext in the article and in reader comments is that men are able to earn more money because women do “unpaid work” around the house. This is kind of a cornerstone of the American family law system, i.e., that the lower-earning spouse somehow contributed to the higher-earning spouse’s ability to earn (successful women who pay child support and alimony to ex-husbands so that they can have sex with younger/hotter women end up not being too happy about this theory), though it is no longer an assumption in Germany.

Certainly there do seem to be a lot of high-earning people with spouses who don’t work for wages. But maybe that is simply due to a combination of high tax rates for those marginal earnings and also the fact that increasing after-tax household earnings by 5 percent won’t significantly improve living standards. (And typically sufficient cash can be extracted through litigation following a divorce. See how Jamie Cooper-Hohn collected about $500 million from the English courts without working for wages.) Consider Sheryl Sandberg. She earned over $1 billion, mostly from Facebook shareholders, without a stay-at-home spouse. Judith Faulkner‘s husband has continued to work as a physician (source) and that hasn’t stopped Ms. Faulkner from earning nearly $3 billion by building Epic Systems. Hillary Clinton would perhaps argue that Judith Faulkner could have made a lot more if she had been a guy, but does anyone argue that she would have earned more if her husband had quit his doctor job?

New York Times readers don’t seem to have much doubt as to the potential earnings boost from an adult at home 9-5. Here’s a reader comment:

if the man is able to gather assets into the marriage because he has his wife at home doing his laundry, cooking his meals, and caring for his children, the assets reasonably and ethically belong to both parties. If he wants to negotiate a rate of pay with her, wherein he pays her for all the things she does for the family, then it would make more sense to talk about who earned what if it becomes time to divide the property.

I agree with this comment’s second point, which is not too different from what happens in some European jurisdictions where lifetime alimony is not available. If a couple makes the decision that one will stay at home, the working partner puts money into the stay-at-home partner’s retirement account. This way they don’t spend 100% of their assets (and their children’s assets) on legal fees to have a judge figure out what is the fair division of assets and income post-divorce.

The first point raises a question, however. I responded with

Is there a basis for the assumption that a stay-at-home spouse increases a person’s earnings? Do companies find out that an employee has a stay-at-home spouse and say “Wow, here’s your fat pay raise”? In nearly every part of the U.S. a child can be parked with the government until 3 pm and then be seamlessly handed off to an “after-school program” until dinner time. If a child is in school or in an after-school program from 8 am to 6 pm, how does the presence or absence of a stay-at-home spouse affect the earnings of a worker?

You mention laundry. There are services that will pick up and drop off laundry. You mention cooking meals. Americans have been known to survive on take-out or pre-prepared meals from supermarkets.

If you’re right on the impossibility of making money without having a stay-at-home spouse, how is it that single people are able to earn significant money? Who does their laundry and cooks their meals?

Of course it is nice to have a wonderful home environment and there is a lot of value delivered to a family by an adult who enhances that environment, but I am not sure how we get from that to the assumption that this affects the earnings of a full-time worker who is part of that household.

Readers: What do you think? Does consuming a home-cooked meal enable you to earn more money? Does sleeping in an elaborate suburban home enable you to earn more money than if you lived in a smaller full-service apartment? Can you earn more money if you have a stay-at-home spouse doing child care compared to if kids are parked in commercial care?

[Personally I was at my most productive when I lived in a modest rental apartment and consumed most meals from restaurants and/or corporate cafeterias. For one thing, I didn’t spend half of my life on the phone with Whirlpool and GE trying to get appliances repaired!]

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Due to the large number of American voters who want a planned economy and the tendency of American politicians to bury the nation in debt and pension obligations, a large proportion of our economy is already “socialist” in the senses that (a) government ministries decide what kind of housing people will occupy, how much they will spend on food every month, and what kind of health care they will get, and (b) the government needs to collect roughly 50 percent of GDP in taxes in order to stay solvent (currently less is being collected, but insolvencies, such as Detroit and Puerto Rico, are becoming more commonplace).

In other words, we may already have become a “socialist” country without any public debate on whether or not that is what we want.

This Wall Street Journal article by Larry Lindsey, a former Federal Reserve governor, has some interesting statistics on the extent to which our economy is now centrally planned:

In 1968, government transfer payments totaled $53 billion or roughly 7% of personal income. By 2014, these had climbed to $2.5 trillion—about 17% of personal income. Despite the redistribution of a sixth of all income, inequality measured by all three of the Census Bureau’s indexes is far higher today than in 1968.

Transfer payments under Mr. Obama increased by $560 billion. By contrast private-sector wages and salaries grew by $1.1 trillion. So for every $2 in extra wages, about $1 was paid out in extra transfer payments—lowering the relative reward to work. Forty-five million people received food stamps in mid-2015, an increase of 46% since the end of 2008. Similarly, 71.6 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, an increase of 13.3 million since October 2013.

In 2008, during the deepest recession in 75 years, 13.2% of Americans lived below the government’s official poverty line. The Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, but in 2014, after five years of economic expansion, 14.8% of Americans were still in poverty. The economy was better, and there were a lot more handouts, but still poverty rose.

The structure of American households shows how this happened. From 2008 through 2014, the most recent year for which we have data, the number of two-earner households declined. These two-earner households have become the backbone of the American middle class.

Research by the Hamilton Project and the Urban Institute show that when families with children making between $20,000 and $50,000 attempt to have a second earner go back to work, the effective tax rate on the extra earnings—including lost government benefits such as food stamps, the earned-income tax credit, and medical support payments—is between 50% and 80%.

While the number of two-earner households declined during the first six years of the Obama presidency, the number of single-earner households rose by 2.6 million and the number of households with no earners rose by almost five million. In other words, two thirds of the increase in the number of families under Mr. Obama was accounted for by households with no one working.

Some of this is territory covered in The Redistribution Recession, but the relevant point is that these dramatic changes in the structure of society have occurred without any real political debate. No politician stood up and said “Who agrees with me that sitting at home playing Xbox should result in roughly the same spending power as working 40 hours per week at a lower-wage job?” (As noted in an earlier posting, paying people to sit home idly is neither a necessary nor even a conventional feature of “socialist” economies; the Soviet Union didn’t have able-bodied people without jobs.)

With Bernie in the White House Americans would be forced to answer questions such as “What does American socialism mean” and “Under what circumstances should someone be provided with a lifetime of free housing, food, and health care?” Perhaps the answers would result in a similar system to what we have now, but at least it would then be an affirmative answer rather than a place to which we were gradually nudged.

Related:

• “A Brief History of Divorce in America” — how we got to a situation, without any voter input, where having sex with three cardiologists (e.g., in Massachusetts) would yield the same spending power as going to medical school and becoming a cardiologist.

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One of Hillary Clinton’s main campaign points is that women don’t get paid, on average, as much as men. She’s about to make the “gender gap” stat worse, though, by quitting a $20 million/year job giving talks to Goldman Sachs et al. and taking a $400,000/year government job (President of the United States). So Hillary will be taking dramatic action, once in office, to address a problem that she herself exacerbated!

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“Save the children… from having to use Windows 10.” What if you were a schoolkid in rural Oaxaca (about an hour’s drive from the part the tourists enjoy) without Internet and wanted to learn from Wikipedia, Khan Academy, etc.? Kids on Computers has figured out how to set up labs in schools with a Raspberry Pi driving each child’s monitor. The Raspberry Pi runs a version of Unix, a web browser, a video player, etc.

Do you want to be a hero to some young Mexicans? Instead of spending time expressing righteous anger on Facebook regarding Donald Trump’s existence, you could work long enough to earn $68 pre-tax dollars and then make a tax-deductible purchase of a Raspberry Pi and have it shipped to my house or Avni Khatri’s. Email me (philg@mit.edu) if you need the address. Avni can send you a letter for the IRS. Look on the bright side of spendthrift government: With Bernie’s new tax rates, maybe you’ll get 90 percent of the $68 back!

[You might ask why I’m not buying a huge stack of these myself. It seems that there is a limit to how many a single individual can purchase.]

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A friend who constantly advocates for Bernie Sanders, higher taxes, solar power, government-set wages for women, bigger government, etc. posted the following on Facebook:

… it is a sense of “female social superiority” as in, females generally speaking are more community oriented, more nurturing and more considerate of others.

I responded with

If you changed gender and became a female, Q, would you then become more nurturing and considerate of others? If Bernie Sanders became Bernice Sanders would she be more community-oriented?

That lead to the following exchange:

• Him: I have no idea. If I were a bird I would be able to fly, but currently we have no way to effect such a transformation. We do know that there are gender differences that affect behavior; there was a recent article about gender differences in stress response that I thought was an interesting example.
• Me: I don’t know of an available procedure for you to become a bird, Q. But isn’t it possible for you to identify as a woman starting tomorrow?
• Him: Possibly, but we have no reason to believe that my self-identification as a woman would sufficiently alter my behavior
• Me: So you’re saying that a transgender woman would not share these positive characteristics with a cisgender woman?
• Him: It is an unknowable question since two natural women may not share these properties or possess them in equal measure smile emoticon

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I’ve spend part of this school year tutoring a student in AP Statistics. The course seems to be designed to help reinforce the classic paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”. If the goal of high school is to prepare young people for citizenship and making decisions at work, AP Statistics seems like a spectacular failure. If the goal were to help people make decisions, wouldn’t the core of the class be hypothesis testing? People who take high school stats aren’t necessarily going to become professional statisticians but at least if hypothesis testing were the core they could be appropriately skeptical with regard to claims regarding, e.g., the efficacy of a new drug that taxpayers were being asked to pay for.

Hypothesis testing, however, is relegated to the end of the class/textbook/prep books. Thus for most of the class students have little context for why they are learning most of the material. Is it critically important to know what percentage of people think X based on a survey? Maybe for political pollsters who can then tell candidates how to pander to voters, but the most interesting uses of statistics seem generally to involve answering a question about whether an intervention was effective or not.

What do readers who are stats experts say? Would it make sense to weave hypothesis testing into the entire course?

Related:

• “Supplementary materials for teaching AP statistics?”
• “The Wrong Way to Teach Math” (New York Times article from February 27 using AP stats as the poster child for U.S. incompetence at designing math syllabi)
• “Everybody’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read.” (from “Schooled” in New Yorker)

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At a business/social gathering following Super Tuesday I heard from a variety of Massachusetts residents regarding Hillary Clinton and other politicians:

• (from a Bernie supporter) it would be nice to have a president who didn’t actually have an office at Goldman Sachs
• (from a Trump Supporter) I’m sick of working to support people who don’t work. (Her after-tax income was definitely less than value of housing, food stamps, and health insurance received by a successful Boston-area welfare family. Sadly she was past her child-bearing years and would not have been able to go down the most reliable Massachusetts road for getting cash without working.)
• Hillary and Congress will be making laws that benefit their friends in ways that I won’t even be able to understand. But I know that I’ll be paying for this.
• Ronald Reagan ruined American politics by introducing religion. I can never forgive him for not mentioning the word “AIDS” until after more than 22,000 Americans had died, including a lot of my friends. (This statement regarding Reagan may not be accurate. This article says Reagan talked AIDS in 1985 (same year that a blood test was approved for HIV) and so does this organization, which also notes that about 13,000 Americans had died to that point.)
• (from a Bernie supporter) At least Trump probably won’t try to do that much once he is in office except enjoy being President.
• If Hillary gets elected we should buy stock in Goldman Sachs and Berkshire Hathaway and other companies to which she is connected. We know that they’re going to do great for the next eight years. [See “Warren Buffett’s Nifty Tax Loophole” (Barron’s) for the complexity of Berkshire Hathaway’s relationship with the tax code.]

[Funniest statement of the evening, from a travel industry executive: “We’ve been advertising on PBS…”]

There was no affection expressed for Hillary, even among those who said that they voted for her. The kindest thing that was said that she would be more likely to get legislation passed with Congress than would Bernie Sanders be (hardly anyone was willing to admit to supporting Trump).

With support for Hillary this weak in a passionately Democrat state just one night after Super Tuesday I wonder if she will have a tough time in November. But on the other hand other recent U.S. presidents have been elected without charming everyone. Nixon, for example. George H.W.? George W?

Readers: What do you hear in your neighborhoods? Are voters excited about Hillary or just voting for her because they like other candidates even less?

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The tone of this election year seems to be more feverish than in previous elections. Mitt Romney was quite calm when he said that 47 percent of Americans wouldn’t vote for him because they paid no income tax and/or received a lot of government handouts. He didn’t say that those voters were immoral. He recognized that they could legitimately perceive that it wasn’t in their interest to vote for him.

People today seem to be taking the opposite tack compared to Romney:

• Paul Krugman in the New York Times says that electing Trump will melt the planet
• “GOP must confront Trump nightmare” says the editorial staff of the Boston Globe (same folks portrayed in the movie Spotlight as not bothering for about 10 years to pursue a story about child sexual abuse in churches… but Trump is urgent!). The article concludes with “There’s only one right answer.”

Is there in fact only one right answer? Start with a voter who perceives her job being at risk due to immigration and therefore votes for Donald Trump. According to the current thinking among Democrats, she is “wrong” and/or “evil” and/or “supports fascism/racism/etc.” I haven’t heard anyone say “Well, she is differently situated than I am and therefore naturally would have different interests and vote for a different candidate.” An environmentalist friend says that Donald Trump is an evil populist and that the entire planet will be put at risk if he is elected. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, not the same kind of “populist” due to his experience in Washington. A Sanders victory will ensure that Planet Earth heals.

Some Facebookers are essentially demanding that all of their friends stop whatever they are doing to pay attention more or less full-time to the Great Cause of preventing Donald Trump from becoming a Hitler-style dictator.

I’m wondering why it wouldn’t be legitimate for a person to say that state or local laws were of more interest and that, to the extent political energy was available, he or she was concentrating attention on those laws. Let’s go through some examples.

• Consider a parent with a child who is not being challenged in a public school. That’s a 7-year-old mind going to waste for six hours per day. The federal government and the President have essentially nothing to do with what happens in this school. Would it be wrong for that parent to say “I don’t care if Trump, Bernie, or Hillary wins because I’m working on getting individual assignments for children at Johnnie’s school”?
• How about a Minnesotan who had sex with a successful married dentist and is collecting $22,596 per year in tax-free child support under Minnesota family law. The same child could yield $100,000 per year under Wisconsin law. Would it be unreasonable for the Minnesotan to say “I’m more interested in getting Minnesota to remove the cap on child support so that I can quadruple my spending power than in who occupies the White House”?
• Alfred A. Stoner needs his glaucoma meds every morning, but his state criminalizes marijuana possession. If his state law were changed so that marijuana were legal, as it is in Colorado, for example, he wouldn’t have to worry about being imprisoned. Is Mr. Stoner a bad person because he says “I am putting all of my political effort into marijuana legalization because I would rather be at home with President Trump in the White House than be in prison with Hillary Clinton in the White House”?
• Melissa Labralover wants to take her dog to a neighborhood field to run every morning and every evening with other dogs, but it is illegal to have an off-leash dog in her town and this field is covered in weeds and broken glass (due to teenagers who were forced to turn to beer after being unable to get the glaucoma medication that they required). She wants to see her town budget to clean up the field and to amend its laws so that dogs can be off-leash within the confines of the field. Is she allowed to say “My income is modest so my tax rate is low and I really don’t care what they do 3000 miles away in Washington because what would make the most difference to Rover and me is a dog park”?

Readers: In terms of things that would have a direct impact on your life or your family members’ lives, are you most interested in seeing changes at the federal, state, or local level?

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From “The Golden Generation,” a New Yorker article about Chinese citizens who live in Vancouver:

Last year, the son of China’s richest man posted pictures online of his dog wearing two gold-plated Apple Watches, one on each front paw.

Who else has found a use for the Apple Watch?

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