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Journalists keep referring to the years of “austerity” that Greece has endured. Government spending has been cut so much that it is now only 58.5 percent of GDP (heritage.org). What does a country that hasn’t suffered austerity spend? Singapore’s government clocks in at 14.4 percent (same source). How about a command-and-control centrally planned Communist dictatorship? China is at 25 percent. A socialist cradle-to-grave welfare state? Sweden is at 52 percent.

Are the Heritage data wrong? If not, how is it possible that Greece continues to be cited as an example of a country where the government doesn’t spend enough?

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I signed up for the free three-month trial of Apple Music. Do you want to listen to between 1/4 and 1/3 of the average work? If so, Apple Music is ideal. The “Classical” radio station on Apple Music picks tracks at random from five centuries of classical music. You’ll get one movement of a symphony followed by one movement of a chamber work composed a century later. Although it is nice that it is commercial-free, this is absurdly inferior to what you can get for free by streaming KING FM.

Related:

• Google Play Music for classical music fans

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Twelve years ago I wrote a post asking why there weren’t Prius-style powerboats. I was out the other day on a friend’s sailboat (“it was like time had stopped”) and it occurred to me to check up on this concept.

Here’s what I have found:

• Elco, a company near Albany, New York has been doing this for 120 years, with all possible variations
• The Slovenians have built a diesel-electric hybrid up to 40′ long (link) but it seems pretty slow for the price and it is unclear if there is any real battery-only endurance. (The Slovenians are also leaders in electric-powered airplanes; see the Pipistrel Alpha Electro.)
• Boating Mag says that you can go forever at 2.6 mph on solar power in a 22′ boat.
• a company that sells powertrains, including outboard motors
• Feadship monster yacht with hybrid drive for extended range
• French diesel-electric modest-sized boat
• pure electric party boat that can run for 7 hours at sailboat-style speeds (5.5-7 mph)
• electric boat to tow water skiers
• Torqueedo (German electric-powered outboard motors); they claim to be the market leader and offer up to 80 hp. They also offer a complete “hybrid drive” (though in fact it seems to be generator feeding electric) and some crazy high-voltage battery packs (example).

It seems as though we still don’t have a Prius-of-the-waves, i.e., a mass-produced boat where the propeller is sometimes driven by the internal combustion engine and sometimes by an electric motor. Matt O’Toole’s comment on the 2003 posting was “Modern generator sets are really quiet, and electric motors are very small, simple, and reliable, and don’t require a separate gearbox — just a switch to go backwards. I think the way to go about this is to forget the Prius (which has a much different set of service requirements), and use a standard marine generator set, a big bank of deep cycle batteries, an off the shelf marine charging system, and an electric motor of your choice.”

Is it as simple as this mournful chart of energy density? Is the extra weight of batteries in a boat more of a hindrance than the extra weight of batteries in a rolling vehicle such as a car? Why should weight be bad when a lot of boats (sailboats at least!) have lead ballast in the keel. Why can’t batteries at the bottom of the hull be the source of stability? (The German battery holds 40 amp-hours at 345V. They say that an 80 hp push can be sustained for about 30 minutes with two of these batteries (range chart) or a slow cruise can be maintained for hours.)

Is the problem complexity and the harsh marine environment? In some ways it is hard to beat the simplicity of a shaft bolted to the back of a diesel engine, though presumably the lack of moving parts in a solar-powered system could make it more reliable than anything where the source of energy was combustion.

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“Husbands of female breadwinners most at risk for cheating, says study” is a CNN story on an academic study finding that men are more likely to have affairs when their wife earns more than they do while wives are correspondingly less likely to cheat. The financial incentives and intersection with state-by-state family law are deemphasized.

Let’s look at the financial incentives. Consider the pampered husband of a financial industry executive. They’ve been married for 30 years while she works for an investment bank and he paints in a home studio while nannies watch the kids. His wife is now 60 years old and about to retire. Her fertility is exhausted. Her earnings are about to cease and all of the financial value that she contributed to the marriage is now in savings and retirement accounts.

The husband thinks to himself “Perhaps it would be more enjoyable to be having sex with 22-year-old women from Craigslist.” Suppose that he indulges in this new lifestyle with at least four such women (“I think a man can have two, maybe three, affairs while he is married. But three is the absolute maximum. After that, you’re cheating.” — Yves Montand). If this leads to either spouse heading down to the courthouse for a no-fault divorce the typical U.S. state will reward him with 50% of the wife’s accumulated earnings and future pension. Should we need to look further to explain the data?

 

 

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In April 2015 I wrote a post about how higher minimum wages could cause massive unemployment if more employers copied Costco. I noted that “even a casual visitor to [Costco, Target and Walmart] can notice that the work being done per employee per hour is not the same.”

Can you get ahead in academia by studying phenomena that are apparent to consumers? Apparently so! “Why ‘Good Jobs’ Are Good for Retailers” is a 2012 Harvard Business Review article by Zeynep Ton, a business school professor at MIT. She turned this into a The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits in 2014 and now the New York Times is excited about it (article in today’s paper).

Professor Ton says to business people “You can cut your labor cost as a percentage of revenue by hiring higher-quality workers and leaving the low-quality workers to competitors or SSDI.” What the New York Times hears is “Every American can be a high quality worker if paid sufficiently high wages.” Professor Ton quantifies the savings of retailers from not competing with SSDI and TANF: “Sales per employee at Costco are almost double those at Sam’s Club.” As we can be pretty sure that Costco’s per-worker labor costs (wage, health care, taxes, etc.) are not double those of Sam’s Club, this means that Costco spends less on labor than does Sam’s Club. Another way to look at this is “If you don’t have the potential to be twice as productive as a Sam’s Club worker you will not be hired by Costco.”

It is worth looking at the reader comments on the NYT piece. By cutting labor costs as a fraction of sales, Costco and similar companies should be reducing the share of the economic pie enjoyed by labor and enlarging the slide of pie enjoyed by owners of capital (e.g., the Costco shareholders and/or the executives looting from them). But the liberal readers celebrate this move in the direction of less equality because they are dazzled by the headline dollars/hour number paid to the remaining handful of workers.

[Note that the New York Times pays its own journalists less than they could make by having sex with married foreigners and collecting child support. See the discussion of Times reporter Liza Ghorbani in this August 2013 posting.]

Related:

• “The Redistribution Recession” (June 2015 book review)
• “The lottery winner who kept his job at Costco” (March 2013)
• “unemployed = 21st century draft horse?” (August 2010 post about how low-skilled workers can be prohibitively costly to a modern enterprise)

 

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“Intact Families, Continued: The Red-County Advantage” is a July 1, 2015 New York Times article about the tendency of people who are living the 1950s American lifestyle (children living in a home with both parents) to vote Republican.

When interviewing legislators for realworlddivorce.com we never could get a clear answer for their rationale in making quick marriages and divorces, or one-night encounters leading to childbirth, potentially so much more lucrative than going to college and working. Why offer $40,000 per year tax-free for 23 years (Massachusetts) for having a child with a $250,000 (pre-tax) per year earner? Why would collecting child support in about half of U.S. states potentially pay 10-30X more than providing a home to a foster child? Researchers Brinig and Allen (see “These Boots are Made for Walking” and their follow-on papers) found that these incentives encourage the filing of divorce lawsuits. Aside from divorce litigators, judges, and psychologists who are paid witnesses in court, who could have an interest in encouraging that?

This Times article explains that it is in fact rational for one political party to encourage divorces and out-of-wedlock childbirth.

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Thought for this morning: Is Greece the equivalent of GM? Here are some parallels:

• GM promised to pay out more in pensions than what it could earn in profits (2009 post); Greece promised to pay out more in pensions than what it could collect in tax revenue
• GM received about $100 billion in taxpayer dollars while its competitors received nothing; Greece has received about $400 billion mostly from its partners (also competitors in many industries, such as agriculture and tourism) within the EU

I was always shocked that Ford could survive as a company when its major competitor had just been handed $100 billion for free. Now I’m wondering why Greece isn’t doing better than some of its competitors. With $400 billion in free money, shouldn’t Greece have an edge over other countries in the region? Maybe the answer is that the people who provided the $400 billion want it back, but Greece is sovereign and, assuming it is willing to live within its means going forward, can simply say “we’re not giving any of it back.” That would leave Greece as having had a massive injection of free cash, especially on a per-capita basis, that neighboring countries haven’t enjoyed. Greece could even keep the euro in the same way that Ecuador uses U.S. dollars as its official currency without having any special ties to the U.S. Treasury.

Clearly there is something wrong with the above analysis because (1) Ford is still more profitable than GM, and (2) Greece is the subject of a constant stream of doom-and-gloom journalism. But I can’t figure out why this back-of-the-envelope calculation is wrong. In short: assuming that they’re not going to pay it back, shouldn’t Greece be better off than a country that had never borrowed $400 billion?

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“Revenge Killing: Race and the death penalty in a Louisiana parish” is a New Yorker story about a man in Louisiana sentenced to death after either a tragic murder or a tragic accident, depending on which medical expert you believe. As with similar stories from the magazine, the description of the legal process is thorough.

[Note: the New Yorker editors implied with their headline that this was a racially-motivated prosecution and verdict. The text of the article does not support that headline, however. The prosecutor admits to a prejudice against children of divorced and unwed parents:

[Prosecutor] Cox told me that in the past forty years he had never prosecuted a man between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six who grew up in a nuclear family. “Not one,” he said. He believes that the “destruction of the nuclear family and a tremendously high illegitimate birth rate” have brought about an “epidemic of child-killings” in the parish.

But there is no evidence that the prosecutor is prejudiced against anyone on any other basis, including the “race” characteristic of the headline. There were three black members of the jury and all apparently voted “guilty” for this defendant, who happens to be black.]

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I asked a couple of divorce litigators what they thought of the movie Boyhood. The quote “Women are never satisfied. They’re always looking to trade up.” was cited with approval.

They liked the mother’s practice of multiple marriages and divorces, but couldn’t understand how she could have been so badly informed as to be doing it in Texas (virtually no alimony). Had she been married in Connecticut, for example, she could have been collecting alimony off at least one husband at all times.

They thought that it was unrealistic that the mother was not engaged in post-divorce litigation with the father of her children, at least to get court orders for more lucrative child support payments as his income grew.

What do readers think of the film? Personally I thought the least credible part was the carefree musician becoming an actuary without ever once having a math book in his hands. Also, if he was an actuary working in tax-free Texas (BLS says $94,000/year median pay in 2012), why wasn’t he rich enough to keep his classic muscle car?

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The Wall Street Journal has a story about how Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny is America’s #1 bestselling book. The author is Holly Madison, a 35-year-old who was at one time Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend and lived in the Playboy Mansion (Hefner is 89).

The reader comments are interesting. One reader disputes that there is any “correlation, positive or negative, between beauty and intelligence. Some beautiful women are intelligent and some are not.” This is at variance with “Intelligence and physical attractiveness” (Kanazawa 2011, Intelligence), which found a positive correlation.

Here’s a response to a commenter attacking Madison for being a bimbo:

Actually she is quite an intelligent person. I heard her do an interview with a business news site two years or so ago. I was very impressed with her performance. She’s articulate, can think on her feet (or her back, depending, I guess on the needs of the moment) and is not afraid of any questions. Unlike interviews that the news media does with Hillary Clinton, the interview was not rehearsed, the questions were not presented to her in advance so her staff could prepare canned answers, and the interviewer did not fawn all over her George Stephanopolus-style.

Yes, she used her assets. Why not? Do we really think that the offspring of rich, powerful politicians and mega rich media moguls really shot right to the top of daddy’s empire because of their brains and business ability?

Andrew Cuomo would be parking cars for a living if not for daddy.

What about the general idea of Americans being more interested in the memoir of a rich geezer’s young girlfriend than in The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (a recent download to my Kindle, though I haven’t read it yet)? Kenneth Tarr noted

In some ways, entertainment today is like the Roman amphitheaters in days of old, when entertainment had to become more extreme to keep the citizens engaged.

Has anyone who reads this blog also read this book? What is there to say about Ms. Madison’s bestseller?

Related:

• child support cashflow from a brief encounter at the Playboy Mansion (see the California chapter of Real World Divorce for the formula)
• comment on NBC News article on Bill Cosby at the Playboy Mansion:

If you are a success out West, get ready for women to pretend to be your soul mate, until you don’t fall for their lies and trickery. Then, since their Plan A failed at you getting them pregnant so they can live off child support for the rest of their lives, Plan B kicks in: the rape and abuse allegations. The goal is to get the same amount of money but by different means. I had five women attempt to scam me after moving out West. Of the five, two were psychopaths — with children from many different fathers! All living off over $10,000 a month in child support.

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