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A Pew Research study on domestic time allocation has some interesting data on two-career American families.

While politicians are saying that being a parent is “incredibly challenging” (previous post) and therefore higher-income parents need to be showered with government handouts funded by taxes on the lower-income childless, the majority of survey respondents said that it was either “easier” or “no different” to seek career advancement while parenting.

A New York Times article on this study also references “The Production of Inequality: The Gender Division of Labor Across the Transition to Parenthood”, a 2015 paper from the Journal of Marriage and Family (funded with your tax dollars by the National Science Foundation, but of course you don’t have the right to download or read it). In two-career house households, compared to women the men did more hours per week of “paid work” and fewer hours per week of “child care.” (The authors seem to be fully up on modern gender theory so I am kind of surprised that they have only these two gender categories and also that they didn’t find out who in the survey sample had changed gender one or more times during the study.)

The three academics who wrote the study pretty much ensured that men would come up short on the childcare front by picking a sample of couples expecting their first child and surveying them just before the birth and then at a point when the child was 9 months old. Where the paper says “child care” what was actually surveyed is “infant care.” Consider also our society’s obsession with breastfeeding for a full year, especially for the first child, and I am not sure why we had to bleed tax dollars to learn that it was the mom who spent more time with the infant.

If we consider that the median fertility of an American woman is 2 (Census.gov) and that a child is a pre-verbal infant for at most two years, the study mostly sheds light on gender roles during 4 years out of 80 years of a woman’s expected life (i.e., covers 5 percent of an American woman’s life; 2.5 percent if you want to restrict to the breastfeeding phase).

Just how onerous is it to have a 9-month-old in diapers around the house? “Physical child care” occupied the two adults for a total of 25 hours per week. Add in “child engagement” (“look at that amazing explosion on TV, Junior!”) for another 11 hours per week.

Readers would be disappointed if there weren’t an analysis of the economics here. Suppose that the typical 9-month-old of the survey were the result of a one-night encounter in a Massachusetts bar with a dentist earning $250,000 per year. The after-tax revenue yield from obtaining custody of that child would be $40,000 per year (based on our interviews with litigators, the loser parent is typically ordered to pay the child’s actual expenses on top of this child support guideline amount). That’s based on the winner parent taking care of the child 2/3rds of the time, which would correspond to 16.65 hours per week of physical child care. That’s an after-tax wage of $46 per hour. The cash economy wage for taking care of someone else’s child is $15 per hour and thus it is straightforward to earn 3X as much for taking care of one’s own biological child. Another point of comparison is that the median hourly pre-tax wage in Massachusetts is $21.50/hour (BLS) and thus it is also possible to earn roughly 3X as much for taking care of one’s own child as it is for going out into the W2 workforce.

[The above analysis is probably incorrect because it is based on child care inputs by a married couple. Previous studies have shown that working single mothers invest less time in their children than working married mothers (I’m not aware of any study looking at time investment by single fathers). So the wage would be higher than the above calculation suggests. And if an older child required less care than a 9-month-old, the wage would also rise over time. This 2014 Pew study, which aggregates care of children of all ages under 18, found that single working mothers spend only 10 hours per week on child care. Their wage, assuming that they had sex in Massachusetts with a partner earning $250,000/year and that they had sex with a different partner for each child, would be roughly $77 per hour (tax-free) per child, i.e., $154 per hour if two children can be cared for simultaneously.]

The authors conclude, from looking at a snapshot of family life when the child is 9 months old, “the stalled gender revolution suggests that women’s gains in the marketplace have slowed and that women continue to lag behind men economically, in part because they are unable to pursue their careers in the same manner as men because of uneven unpaid work responsibilities” and “that parenthood remains an important barrier to a complete gender revolution.” Given the (1) high percentage of American children who are born out of wedlock, (2) the tendency of children to grow out of the 9-month-old breastfeeding-and-diapers stage, and (3) the number of marriages with children that are terminated by the mother suing the father for divorce, I wonder if this conclusion is justified. If the authors are right in their implication that women are getting a raw deal out of marriage, aren’t we forced to conclude that a lot of American women are behaving irrationally, at least from an economic perspective?

Birth control, abortion, and sterilization are widely available; why would American women give birth if the result is exploitation by a man? Why are women agreeing to get married? Given that nearly all live in a legal environment in which no-fault divorce is available, profitable child support is available, and women win more than 90 percent of custody lawsuits, why wouldn’t women terminate their marriages once they wised up to what a raw deal it was? What enables American men to lure women into this trap and then keep them there? If men in some more enlightened country are better partners, why wouldn’t American women seek to emigrate to that country and marry a man there? And, finally, in our world in which gender reassignment surgery may be paid for by an employer or health insurer and where people are encouraged to talk about their unconventional sexual preferences… why would a heterosexual woman choose to continue to identify as such? Why continue voluntarily as a member of an exploited class?

[On the other hand, even if we accept the study’s conclusions, perhaps American women are not behaving entirely irrationally economically when you factor in divorce litigation statistics. A lot of women sue their husbands when the youngest child is 2 years old and thus easier to place into commercial care. The result of a quickie marriage+divorce is often less child support profit than could have been obtained from one-night encounters with higher-income men, but (a) some hands-on assistance during the early years of child-rearing, (b) ownership of a fully setup house, (c) greater likelihood that the father will take care of the child(ren) at least every other weekend, thus freeing up a lot of leisure time for the mother. On the third hand, having escaped economic exploitation by Husband #1, a lot of divorce plaintiffs end up marrying Husband #2, thus suggesting that there is something beneficial to women in the condition of marriage+children (if not marriage to the father of those children).]

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“Mass. among the worst in US for public records access; An ‘F’ for state on open records” from the November 9, 2015 Boston Globe:

The state earned a grade of F and ranked 40th, below states such as Mississippi and Arkansas, in the category of public records access, according to the Center for Public Integrity…

The center described public access to state documents in Massachusetts as “terrible,” citing in part the fact that the Legislature, judiciary, and governor’s office are exempt from the open records law, which was passed in 1973. The Globe has reported that Massachusetts is the only state in the country with such a wide exemption.

Related:

• “Middlesex County, Massachusetts May 2011 Divorce Lawsuits Analysis” (tedious because a maximum of 10 cases per day can be studied, though in theory all are public records)

 

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Facebook postings in chronological order:

• Watching San Andreas movie on JetBlue. Opening scene has them trying to rescue a woman whose car is teetering on the side of a cliff. They park the Huey in an out of ground effect hover right over the car and yet the rotor wash does not simply push the car down into the gulch. I am beginning to think this is a purely fictional work.
• Now the rich douchebag real estate developer has his private jet land at KOAK instead of KSFO when going to downtown SF. Further difficulty suspending disbelief.
• Their buildings are falling down but they still have great Internet connectivity.
• There is nobody standing in line to pay $5 for a cup of drip coffee. Definitely not filmed on location.
• I am not even sure that the Rock is sitting in the correct seat. He is supposed to be the senior pilot. I thought aircraft commander typically sits left seat in a Huey. Of course half the time he seems to be simply abandoning the pilot seats in order to run the hoist or whatever.
• Others seem to have the same questions: https://www.quora.com/Do-rescue-helicopters-have-a-hover-button-as-seen-on-San-Andreas-2015-movie
• Girl whose mom abandoned her dad for the rich douchebag is now expressing surprise that the rich douchebag abandoned her.
• Huey seems to be proceeding to SF from LA with no fuel stop. Maybe there will be an autorotation.
• The ragged out military surplus Huey seems to be as quiet as a library for conversation.
• Gearbox failed. Major failure to maintain attitude during the auto. Worse than beginner R22 student chasing needles. (Saved perhaps by the massive amount of rotor inertia in a Huey, though in some of the shots it looked as though the collective was still up next to the seat during the purported auto.)
• They are supposedly getting fuel for their airplane but they are still in a hangar (no ISO 9001 for this airport) and there is no fuel truck or line guy.
• Why is there a tsunami if the earthquake was along an inland fault?
• http://www.bustle.com/articles/85496-can-a-san-andreas-earthquake-cause-a-tsunami-the-movie-definitely-stretches-the-facts
• http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-12/why-arent-we-afraid-tsunami-hitting-san-francisco is more comprehensive

Why do they show this movie on flights to SFO? (And thanks, JetBlue, for the free WiFi!)

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Plenty of folks are writing about the sacrifices of life and limb made by U.S. military veterans. I’m grateful but don’t have anything original to add so I thought I would write a note of appreciation for the contributions made by military design engineers (as distinct from “military engineers” who may have built impressive roads, etc.).

Gerry Sussman, one of my advisors at MIT, liked to point out how the N connector and BNC connector were compatible in an emergency, something that he attributed to engineers designing for military use.

World War II was also a great time for military-driven innovation in aircraft and avionics, still paying peacetime dividends, but it is tough to pinpoint specific design engineers who were actually in the military and separate their accomplishments from those working for contractors. For example, I’m pretty sure that someone in the U.S. Air Force was responsible for our country’s early lead in integrated circuits, but I can’t figure out who it was (see this history of Texas Instruments for “while the U.S. Air Force showed some interest in TI’s integrated circuit, industry reacted skeptically.”; see also Wikipedia).

That’s my Veteran’s Day message: Thanks to the engineers inside the U.S. military who pushed for technology that all of us can now use on a daily basis.

Readers: Can you think of specific active duty U.S. military service members who contributed to technology?

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A friend’s posting on Facebook:

I’m a little concerned about my daughter’s ideas on beauty. A few weeks ago, she told me that I’m the only person she loves who isn’t pretty. When questioned further, she acknowledge there are some other people she loves who aren’t pretty. … Last night, she said she loved Daddy more than me because he is more pretty.

[My friend has many virtues, including having worked hard enough to earn a PhD in Computer Science and having been creative enough to write a thesis that was worth reading, but, as with most of the rest of us in the software world, she is not besieged by phone calls from modeling agencies.]

My response:

The ancient Greeks thought that beauty was as much a virtue as intelligence or anything else. So she is not totally off the human reservation in her thinking. Adults say that beauty is irrelevant but kids watch what we do, not what we say. So after hearing about how it doesn’t matter what you look like, the child then hears a pediatrician (female as it happened) compliment a little girl on “looking cute”. So plainly adults do think this is a virtue and an achievement. And presumably they also see adults paying more attention to attractive people. I’m not sure what the right answer is. Maybe to admit that being pretty is great but it is just one possible virtue. And that a more sophisticated approach is to look at the balance of virtues that each person has before deciding that A is more lovable than B based on any single virtue. In other words, don’t assert that “pretty” is less important in our current society than “hard-working” or “honest” or whatever. Children would be able to see for themselves that this is a lie. But point out that being pretty is not more important than a basket of other virtues.

A response from a mutual friend (also a mom with a PhD in CS):

Most young kids are instinctively attracted to people who are physically attractive (which is unfortunate, but it’s overwhelmingly true.) That doesn’t mean they’ll grow up to be shallow people. I think you can be “relieved” that she has already learned to notice and articulate the dimension of physical beauty, because that’s a prerequisite for learning to separate physical attractiveness from other features that make a person desirable.

If you look at children’s literature and movies, almost everything targeted at the youngest audience has an attractive protagonist and an ugly villain. With a slightly older audience, you start to see pretty villains, but it’s treated as a challenging topic, or it may be treated as a shocking plot twist. Then in adolescent literature, it’s cliche for beautiful people to be cruel.

Separately, what would happen if a group of software and hardware engineers founded a fitness company? Here are a couple of photos of bacon doughnuts from the Fitbit Boston open house:

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I promised myself not to look at anything that any Republican candidate said or did due to the fact that I don’t think any could win (previous posting). But friends keep asking me what I think about these folks so here are my comments on the transcript from last night.

Trump: I hate to say it, but we have to leave [minimum wage] the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard…”

Telling Americans that they have to work harder to earn a higher wage = political suicide.

Carson: Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases….

Mostly consistent with The Redistribution Recession but “there is no free lunch” is not a message most voters want to hear. I would write off Trump and Carson based simply on the above.

Rubio: If you raise the minimum wage, you’re going to make people more expensive than a machine. And that means all this automation that’s replacing jobs and people right now is only going to be accelerated.

Not a message that Americans want to hear. We are special. We are creative. People in Asia are not creative. Machines are like Asians (reliable, consistent, good at math, not creative) and therefore can never replace Americans.

Kasich: An economic theory is fine, but you know what? People need help.

… and the Great Father in Washington is going to help them. This guy may have some promise. Now that the government is close to 50 percent of the economy (previous posting) it does make sense that Americans seek help from the government. What other entity is big and rich enough?

Cruz: It’s great to be here in Milwaukee.

It is hard to think of a situation in which a person could say this and not be lying.

Cruz: I have rolled out a bold and simple flat tax: 10 percent for every American that would produce booming growth and 4.9 million new jobs within a decade.

How can it possibly work to have a 10-percent federal tax rate in a country where the federal government is more than 20 percent of the GDP (with state and local governments bringing us up closer to 40 or 50 percent, depending on how you look at Obamacare)?

Bush: A corporate rate of 20 percent, which puts us 5 percent above — below that of China, and allows us full expensing of investing. It would create an explosion of investment back into this country, creating higher-wage jobs, and so that’s part of it.

This would be a disaster for accountants and tax lawyers. The “full expensing of investing” is not something that the average voter can understand (presumably he means toss out our perverse depreciation system, as I suggested in my November 2008 Economic Recovery Plan). This seems like a losing message with voters who are passionate about soaking rich companies and would be much more receptive to a proposal for Third World-style capital controls to stop the corporate exodus.

Fiorina: Well, first of all, I must say as I think about that question, I think about a woman I met the other day. I would guess she was 40 years old. She had several children. And she said to me, you know, Carly, I go to bed every night afraid for my children’s future. And that really struck me. This is America. A mother is going to bed afraid for her children’s future.

It seems safe to assume that Fiorina did not tell the woman “If you wanted financial security, you should have read Real World Divorce and had sex with a married dermatologist for the first kid, then had sex with a drunken Medicaid pediatric dentist for the second, etc. Having established a tax-free, location-independent source of income, you could have moved yourself and your children to a low-debt, high-income, high-growth country anywhere in the world.”

Fiorina: We need to pass the REINS Act so Congress is in charge of regulation, not nameless, faceless bureaucrats accountable to no one.

This led me to Google and I found a relevant article. This seems naive because oftentimes the bureaucrats who make a living enforcing regulations present the most influential testimony on Capitol Hill. See this Washington Post article, for example. Some politicians are considering cutting off taxpayer funds used to try to get child support cash from imprisoned fathers. Who is enthusiastic about chasing after incarcerated African-American guys? Frances Pardus-Abbadessa, head of child support enforcement for New York City. (See this YouTube video at 6 minutes in for how Ms. Pardus-Abbadessa is getting her share of $6 billion.)

Kasich on immigration: in 1986 Ronald Reagan basically said the people who were here, if they were law-abiding, could stay. But, what didn’t happen is we didn’t build the walls effectively and we didn’t control the border. We need to.

Translation: despite spectacular budget increases, the U.S. government has demonstrated continuous incompetence in this area for the past 30 years but somehow it will become competent. I wonder if this guy just checked the wrong box a long time ago and nobody has noticed that he is in fact a Democrat with unlimited faith in Big Government.

Cruz regarding entitlements: for seniors we should make no changes whatsoever, for younger workers we should gradually raise the retirement age, we should have benefits grow more slowly, and we should allow them to keep a portion of their taxes in a personal account that they control, and can pass on to their kids…

Translation: I have no clue what to do and the actuarial disaster won’t be fully apparent until I’m out of the White House.

Cruz on immigration: the politics of it will be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande. Or if a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press. Then, we would see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our nation.

Beautifully phrased! (albeit irrelevant)

Fiorina: Obamacare has to be repealed because it’s failing… …it’s failing the very people it was intended to help, but, also, it is croney-capitalism at its worst. Who helped write this bill? Drug companies, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, every single one of those kinds of companies are bulking up to deal with big government.

Self-contradictory? If Obamacare is crony capitalism then the “people it was intended to help” were executives and shareholders in the health care industry. In that case, Obamacare is not failing but rather it is working beautifully.

Carson: …there are a lot of people who say, if you get rid of the deductions, you ruin the American dream because, you know, home mortgage deduction. But the fact of the matter is, people had homes before 1913 when we introduced the federal income tax, and later after that started deductions.

How is this persuasive? Nobody can remember what things were like before the Great Father in Washington guided everything. Most Americans seem to think that before Social Security and Medicare older Americans would wander off into the snow to die at age 60-65 and that, before publicly funded schools, Americans couldn’t read.

Paul: I’m also in favor of a plan called the penny plan where we’d just cut 1 percent across the board and the budget actually balances in less than five years.

This seems false. Growth in government spending on health care and pensions (including Social Security) will be more than 1 percent annually, won’t it?

Cruz: There are more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible…

The real question is whether the IRS code or the Bible has a larger effect on American lives!

Cruz: if you’re a single mom, if you’re making $40,000 a year, what [his tax cut] means is an extra about $5,000 in your pocket

Assuming that the “single mom” has median fertility (rounds to two kids), why didn’t she have sex with two different men, each with a reasonably high income? In that case, assuming an appropriately chosen state in which to have sex (e.g., Massachusetts or New York), she would be getting a lot more than $40,000 per year, entirely tax free, without having to work. Her child support revenue would be, in most states, a function of the gross income of her defendants. Thus her profits from child-ownership would not be affected by Cruz’s proposed change in tax rates.

Bush: simplify the tax code, to spur economic activity in this country

The companies bailing out of the U.S. are not put off by the complexity of the tax code. They just don’t like the rates!

Rubio: the most important job anyone in this room will ever have, is the job of being a parent. … And so when we set out to do tax reform, we endeavor to have a pro-family tax code, and we endeavor to do it because we know how difficult it is for families in the 21st century to afford the cost of living. … It is expensive to raise children in the 21st century, and families that are raising children are raising the future taxpayers of the United States, and everything costs more.

Let’s make low-income childless Americans work harder to give money to higher-income Americans with children (previous posting).

Rubio: And so, yes, I have a child tax credit increase, and I’m proud of it. I am proud that I have a pro-family tax code, because the pro- family tax plan I have will strengthen the most important institution in the — in the country, the family.

A person will be able to get hold of these credits by getting Clomid online, going to a bar, meeting a drunken married radiologist, etc. Thus the “family” can be a child support profiteer and one or more cashflow-positive children. That will be “the most important institution” that other taxpayers are tapped to subsidize.

Rubio: I do want to rebuild the American military.

Why does the world’s most expensive military need “rebuilding”? Does that not call into question our competence to manage military spending?

Fiorina: how is it possible that the federal government gets more money each and every year, which the federal government has been doing, receiving more money every year for 50 years under republicans and democrats alike, and yet, never has enough money to do the important things?

Occam’s Razor gives us an uncomfortable answer: Americans are not competent to run a big government. No voter wants to hear that he or she is part of an incompetent nation.

Trump: [the latest trade agreement is] 5,600 pages long, so complex that nobody’s read it.

This is kind of impressive! What is in there?

Paul: You can be strong without being involved in every civil war around the [world]…

A well-turned phrase.

Rubio: I’ve never met Vladimir Putin, but I know enough about him to know he is a gangster. He is basically an organized crime figure that runs a country, controls a $2 trillion economy.

Translation: I am envious of this Russian guy.

Rubio: Do you know why these banks are so big? The government made them big. The government made them big by adding thousands and thousands of pages of regulations. So the big banks, they have an army of lawyers, they have an army of compliance officers. They can deal with all these things. The small banks, like Governor Bush was saying, they can’t deal with all these regulations. They can’t deal with all — they cannot hire the fanciest law firm in Washington or the best lobbying firm to deal with all these regulations. And so the result is, the big banks get bigger, the small banks struggle to lend or even exist, and the result is what you have today.

Since these Republicans don’t have any chance of winning, should we buy stock in the biggest banks

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I have an iPhone 6 Plus, which I bought for the camera and because it does not run Samsung’s Contacts app (a.k.a. “raise your blood pressure 20 points app”). Supposedly this phone has a beautiful exterior and is very thin, but I haven’t experienced either of those properties because I put the phone into a protective case shortly after purchase. Now it is thick, fairly durable, and looks nothing like it did when it left the factory in China (or when it’s taxable patented soul left an offshore trust in the Netherlands).

Android users can now enjoy an abuse-proof phone (WSJ on the Droid Turbo 2). How about Apple making a phone for the real world as well? Here’s what I want:

• rubberized exterior so that a toddler can throw it in a 5′ arc and have it land undamaged on a hardwood floor
• thick enough to accommodate a 24-hour battery
• use the thickness to accommodate a larger lens to cover a physically larger camera sensor (maybe 1/1.7″)
• same (awesome) Apple camera software
• (optional but it would be amazing) waterproof down to 10′ for underwater photos

Apple could then have three models for 2016: iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 7 Tough. (Or maybe “iPhone 7 Photographer’s Edition” since the most dramatic difference would be in image quality)

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One of the newer instructors at East Coast Aero Club asked me to fly with his student before signing the guy off for solo.

Here’s what I told the CFI and student pilot during the debrief…

Preflight: On a restart, look for leaks, snapped belts, tight fuel caps, and, if the helicopter was flown for many hours previously, oil level. Never skimp on the walk-around from a 10′ distance all around the helicopter. That’s where you will find inspection doors open, things attached to the skids, etc.

Pre-lift: Never skimp on the top-to-bottom flow check. Very few helicopters have been wrecked because of a subtle problem missed during a preflight mechanical inspection. Many have been crashed because something wasn’t set right and the pilot tried to fix the problem when in a hover or in the air.

Air taxi: The takeoff into an air taxi is the same as a takeoff to fly to New York. Hover power, nudge forward to 45 knots while holding the ship level, then reduce power to 17″ once reaching about 70′ above the ground. Keep the airspeed to 40-50 knots and the altitude 70-100′. That’s enough energy to do a reasonable autorotation while being slow enough to see and avoid obstacles such as trees and antennae and high enough to clear most obstacles at our airport.

Flying patterns: Remember that the inputs are attitude and power. Everything else on the gauges is an output. Don’t worry about the outputs. Concentrate on holding the correct inputs. (On a climb-out where the student had selected a 30-knot attitude I asked “Is this too high a pitch or too low?” and he correctly answered “too high” but wasn’t doing much about it because he was waiting to see what the airspeed indicator would do (it was showing 40 knots with a down trend).) Try to do at least one third of your practice flying with every instrument except the manifold pressure [power gauge] covered. You need to develop a mental catalog of the correct attitudes and power settings for every flight condition. (on our flight the student pilot flew a much better pattern with everything covered)

Shutting down: Watch the RPM gauge as you smoothly and slowly reduce speed from 100%. Then once you are sure that the throttle is moving in the correct direction you can move it a little faster down to 68% for the cool-down.

Overall: Download the Garmin 400/420/430W simulator and try to get it running on your Windows machine (used to be finicky about the graphics card, etc.). Download the Garmin 430W manual as a PDF and learn about all of the buttons, even the ones that are just for IFR flying. You want to make sure that you can quickly get out of any screen or situation with the Garmin confidently and quickly. Plenty of airplanes have been crashed by pilots monkeying with a GPS that they didn’t quite understand.

Try to fly that first solo with 50 or 100 lbs. of weight on the instructor’s side. Otherwise the change in hover attitude can be disconcerting. (Even after 1000+ R44 hours it feels strange to fly the machine solo; I almost want to look back to see if someone is hanging/tugging on the heels of the skids.)

Related:

• a poster from the local elementary school hallway:

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A friend of Facebook cited this New Yorker magazine article: “St. Paul’s School and a New Definition of Rape,” by a professor at Harvard Law School. My friend’s intro: “A thoughtful piece, as always by Jeannie Suk. Taking her last paragraph especially to heart.” And, indeed, the piece is mostly about feelings that one might experience “in the heart.” But criminal justice is one of the largest industries in the United States and therefore people commenting on this issue may be influenced by their wallets. Judges get paychecks, lawyers get paychecks, prison workers get paychecks (larger than Harvard graduates in some states), officials and legislators get paychecks. Different definitions of “rape” may have a significant economic effect on the revenue for this industry because either a larger or smaller percentage of human activities will become potential sources of business. And of course there are oftentimes parallel civil lawsuits when there is an accusation of rape (see Missoula), giving yet more lawyers and judges an economic stake in how many human activities can be classified as “rape.”

Of course, economics may not be the only motivation for people in this debate but why assume that it is entirely irrelevant? Why assume that people in this industry would be just as happy not to be paid as to be paid?

Related: “The Lessons of Stanford’s Sex-Assault-Case Reversal,” a New York Times story on the administrative and legal processes following a year-long relationship between two over-18-year-olds who met (but did not have sex) on the Stanford campus. In a society where we worry about how it will be possible to fund college educations for young people from middle class families, there is no discussion about the resources spent paying university officials and attorneys to argue about sex between these two young people.

Also Related: A TED talk about divorce and its impact on children that was the subject of an email discussion. The speaker is a professor at UC Santa Barbara. Here were some comments:

• “Parents’ conflict is more important than divorce per se” — doesn’t really make sense to consider these things independently. Divorce law often gives people good financial reasons to create conflict (e.g., to cement sole custody and the tax-free river of cash that goes with it). So the two cannot be separated.”
• The whole talk has an enormous blindspot. She is in a state where a woman can go to a bar, have sex with a tipsy patron, and earn more money, after tax, than she gets paid by UCSB. Or where a person can marry three people in succession, stay with each one for 5-10 years, and end up collecting a share of the earnings of three other adults simultaneously. But there is no discussion of financial incentives and their effect on behavior.
• The talk is irrelevant because the present and future of family court action is between biological parents who were never married. The U.S. doesn’t have “children of divorce”; it has “children of people who were never married”.
• To look at an activity that generates $100 billion/year in cashflow and ignore the cashflow makes the analysis incomplete.

 

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Flying the Feathered Edge is an inspiring film about one of the world’s greatest pilots, Bob Hoover. There are a bunch of screenings in various cities on November 11. A group of (mostly) MIT-affiliated pilots watched this at a friend’s house last month on Blu-ray. What amazed us the most is that Hoover would fly high-performance fighter jets wearing a business suit. What’s also impressive, of course, is the amount of risk that a World War II combat pilot or an early Jet Age test pilot had to become comfortable with.

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