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In honor of spending a few days in Florida I indulged in a mystery novel: The Whites (sample review). The plot centers on a group of NYPD detectives who are upset about people whom they believe to be guilty but who can’t be convicted and imprisoned under the prevailing rules. Life for these cops is dramatic and enervating. Somebody gets killed in a bloody manner nearly every night. Nobody is concerned about quietly working until pension age (typically about 41?) and joining the check-of-the-month club. Writing sample:

He hated the no smoking laws. They created nothing but problems—late-night noise for the neighbors, elbow room enough for the bar-cramped beefers to finally start swinging, and a plague of off-duty limos and radio cabs all tapping their horns to hustle fares.

Is it a good book? Sort of. Does it reflect real life? My last long conversation with a New York-area police officer was during an airport-to-Manhattan Uber ride. The driver was a a police officer in a New Jersey town just across the river. He’d been on the force for six years. Was he obsessed with a murderer who got away, like the cops in the book? Sort of. Except the murder victim was his pension plan and the murderer was Governor Chris Christie who has been refusing to raise taxes sufficiently to fully fund the commitments that the state and local governments are making to public employees. A New Jersey cop gets a raw retirement deal compared to a New York cop. The pension starts after 25 years, which means age 43. It is 65 percent of an officer’s base salary, not the total payments including overtime as it would be in New York City or with the Port Authority.

Was there a lot of drama in the life of a NJ cop? “We have two trailer parks in town,” he responded. “That’s a big source of business for the police.” If not in the trailer park, what was he typically doing? “Our most common complaint is domestic violence,” he said. “Though more than half the time you show up and there is no evidence of anything other than maybe the couple had an argument.” (A domestic violence police report can be useful for a New Jersey divorce/custody/child support plaintiff; see Heleniak.) Any other intersection between the world of custody and child support litigation and his work as an officer? “Many women get orders that their children will be exchanged with the father at police stations,” he replied. “If the father is one minute late they ask us to log that and then they have something that they can take to their next court hearing.”

When being a police officer is in fact safer than being a trash collector (Daily Beast) how is it that these dramatic novels continue to be described by reviewers as “realistic”?

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Some of the academic discourse in The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy concerns the minimum wage. The eggheads say that when minimum wage is higher businesses will use less labor:

Traditional labor and macroeconomic theory predicts that marginal labor income tax rates and binding minimum wages distort the labor market and thereby reduce aggregate labor usage, reduce aggregate consumer spending and investment, and, in the short term, increase wages, labor productivity, and the usage of factors that can take the place of labor hours. As a result of greater labor productivity, part of the population—those (if any) not subject to the marginal tax rates or minimum wages—actually works more, even while aggregate work hours are less.

To understand why labor demand might be wage-inelastic, notice that prices are one of the ways in which employers might signal to their customers that the labor market has changed employment costs, and thereby create an elastic labor demand curve. For example, an increase in the minimum wage rate makes labor more expensive, in response to which the employers of minimum wage labor might raise their prices. Customers react to a price increase by purchasing less and, with fewer customers to serve the employers can cut back on their labor. This “pass-through” process, as industrial organization economists call it, links the amount of labor hired to the wage rate through a wage elastic labor demand curve like the one used throughout this book.

The Federal Minimum Wage Hikes Likely Reduced National Employment by Hundreds of Thousands, Especially Among the Young and Unskilled

Using the estimates surveyed in Neumark and Wascher (2008) and information about the amount and character of the July 2009 federal minimum wage hike, Neumark (2009) estimated that the July 2009 hike would reduce national employment among teens and young adults by three hundred thousand. Given that about half of all persons earning at or below the minimum wage in 2008 were under twenty-five and the other half over that age (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2009a), Neumark’s teen and youth estimate suggests that the nationwide employment effect (all ages) of the July 2009 minimum wage hike might be a reduction of about six hundred thousand,

My 2011 paper (Mulligan 2011c) estimated a monthly time series model of national part-time and full-time employment per capita for each of twelve demographic groups distinguished according to race, gender, and age, relative to prime-aged white males, whose employment rates were assumed to be unaffected by the July 2009 minimum wage hike. I used the model to estimate the amount and composition of employment losses due to the hike for the average month between August 2009 and December 2010, and found that lower-skill groups had the greater employment losses. The net nationwide employment loss estimate was 829,000, which includes employment gains among more skilled people

Among persons aged sixteen and over who were neither elderly nor household head or spouse, employment per capita fell from 58.0 percnt in 2007 to 52.3 percent in 2009. If instead their employment rate had continued to be 58.0 percent, about three million more of them would have been working. Thus, the minimum wage hikes since July 2007 might explain about roughly one-third to one-half of the employment decline among persons aged sixteen and over who were neither elderly nor household head or spouse.

Mulligan was talking about the comparatively small rises in minimum wage that occurred between 2007 and 2012. Much larger ones are scheduled, depending on the state and, more recently, on public pressure on companies such as Walmart and McDonald’s. I’m wondering if we can apply our experience as consumers to predicting what will happen.

Costco is known for paying higher wages than Target and Walmart. However, even a casual visitor to the stores in question can notice that the work being done per employee per hour is not the same. The Costco workers know what they are doing, move quickly around the store, and help move an astonishing amount of merchandise per worker. Target and Walmart? Well, let’s just say that the speed at which workers move is highly variable. Could it be the case that with higher minimum wages every retail store will turn into a Costco with a handful of reasonably well paid highly energetic workers? If Target cashiers scanned goods at the same rate as Costco cashiers Target could get by with perhaps 2/3rds as many cashiers.

The McDonald’s that is on my way to Hanscom Field used to have two workers running the drive-thru. One would take the cash and one would hand out the food. Since the Massachusetts minimum wage was pushed to $9 per hour (beginning of 2015) they’ve cut back to just one worker handling both tasks. Presumably they could increase throughput if necessary with a touch-screen ordering system and self-service credit card reader at the order entry position (maybe even simpler with the phone-based payment systems that are catching on).

It seems as though there is general political agreement in the U.S. that the lowest quality workers should be winnowed out of the workforce and the labor force participation rate should be kept on the low side. Nobody wants to see someone get off the couch and go to work all day for less than maybe $12 per hour. A natural question is “What should investors do about this trend?” Building low-income housing where the rent will be mostly paid by the government is already highly profitable. Perhaps invest in the relative handful of companies that are sufficiently close to government officials to be approved for this activity? Invest in Obamaphone providers? (how many are publicly traded?) People have been predicting doom and gloom for the cable TV providers but if there are a few million more customers who have been winnowed out of the workforce, isn’t that a solid source of revenue for them? An American who doesn’t work gets a lot more value out of a cable TV subscription than someone who is at work all day. Go long Comcast?

We will also need a word to describe what happens when a business goes from a large group of low-paid workers to a small group of gung-ho moderately paid workers. My vote: “The business has been Costcoed”.

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For about 1.5 years I have been thinking that Samsung couldn’t possibly leave the Phone/Contacts app on the Galaxy Note 3 unpatched, yet in fact they have done just that. If you search for a friend by name, even after telling the app note to show contacts without phone numbers, you get a huge list of “contacts,” many of whom do not have the name searched for and for almost none of whom the phone has any number. I made a video of the remarkable behavior of this software.

Another knock against the phone/Samsung software/Android is that we couldn’t get it to work with a rented Nissan last month, either for phone calls or to play an audiobook yet a friend’s iPhone worked immediately.

I am about ready to switch to the iPhone 6 Plus partly for compatibility with the rest of the world, e.g., that Nissan, partly because I know that it won’t consider someone to whose email I responded 8 years ago a “contact,” and partly because of the image-stabilized camera and Apple’s excellent camera software. At the same time I am considering switching from Verizon to T-Mobile because Verizon has almost no coverage in my suburban neighborhood while T-Mobile and AT&T have at least some. T-Mobile seems to be about 1/2 the price of Verizon if there is any international usage at all (where T-Mobile is 1/6th the price per minute for voice calls and infinitely cheaper for data and text ($0 extra)). The plan is to use WiFi when calling from home so the iPhone and T-Mobile would have to hand off the call from WiFi to a tower if I were to head out for a walk in the neighborhood with Mindy the Crippler.

What do readers who’ve switched from Verizon to T-Mobile have to say? Is there an obvious reason to pay 2X for Verizon if your house happens to be in a place with poor Verizon coverage? (VZ has worked well most other places, though I have been afraid to turn the device on in a foreign country.)

Finally, is it fair to say that, in terms of keeping Apple stock price high and Apple products popular, the most important contributors are programmers at Samsung, Microsoft, and other potential competitors?

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Here’s a conundrum… A Canon 5D Mark III says “card 2 cannot be read” regarding a Lexar Professional 128 GB 400x SD card. Yet I can put the card into an HP notebook computer and read it or format it (exFAT). I put it into a Sony A6000 and the camera was unhappy about it (“please reinsert card”). Can the card truly be bad if the Windows machine is able to read/format it? I haven’t had a bad SD card before.

Separately, if I do have to replace this card, what’s the best price/performance for a 128 GB SD card that is occasionally used for HD video capture?

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About half of the kid birthday parties to which we’ve been invited lately are what might be called “credit card parties” in which a parent gives a credit card to an indoor gym that provides an hour of bouncy fun followed by plain cheese pizza and a nut-free cake served by minimum-wage 19-year-olds.

One of my childhood memories was watching our parents go out at least once a week to a neighbor’s house for a dinner or cocktail party. Virtually every family in the neighborhood was capable of cleaning up the house, putting some frozen pigs-in-blankets into the oven, and pouring out some wine. Today’s young adults don’t seem to be as capable as hosts as were the 30-somethings of the 1970s. I’m wondering if the next generation of adults will be even worse because they never got the idea that it is okay to spend more than 60 seconds of effort to host a group of friends.

What do readers think? And what about those of you with kids? Are the kids more or less enthusiastic about going to one of these commercial events compared to going to an artisanally organized party at another child’s home?

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According to various news articles, everyone in the Boston area is against the Olympics. Although I’m sure that it will be a waste of $billions I am in favor of us hosting the games and I think we can get more out of them than most other U.S. cities.

What’s special about Boston? We are much more prone to endless argument, studies, debate, and lawsuits than a typical American city. In the time that it would take the Chinese to build four ring highways around a city, Boston can only get about halfway through the litigation about adding a short extra runway at Logan Airport (it was a 30-year process to add Runway 14-32 (a little history) and then litigation continued after completion (e.g., this lawsuit against the FAA)).

Generally civic approval processes in Massachusetts work under the assumption that time is meaningless and money is infinite. With a hard deadline of 2024 people would be forced to make decisions, clear away obstacles, and forgo “let’s do some more study” or “let’s have another lawsuit” conclusions to meetings.

There is no question that at least half of the money spent will be wasted. But that’s true of much that state and local governments do. The difference with the Olympics is that at least something would get done, e.g., completion of various T extensions.

What do readers think? Is hosting an Olympics sensible for a city that otherwise typically ties itself up with NIMBY fights?

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The Associated Press wrote a story with a headline picked up by a variety of news outlets, including Boston.com: “Man reported missing at sea 66 days ago found by Coast Guard”. Louis Jordan probably would have died if the $20 million Jayhawk helicopter funded by the taxpayers hadn’t found him, right? Both the headlined article and this Wavetrain.net article explain that a container ship, the Houston Express, spotted Jordan and took him on board. Jordan was enjoying food and drink on board the ship when the Coast Guard helicopter showed up to bring him back to a hospital (where he was quickly discharged due to nothing being wrong).

If our tax dollars don’t get the credit for this rescue then surely American ingenuity and seamanship do? Well.. it seems that the 1090′-long Houston Express is a German ship, built in South Korea.

[This is not to suggest that the Coast Guard doesn’t execute a lot of amazing rescues. I just thought the headline was an interesting window into the American journalist’s subconscious mind.]

I predict a bright future for Mr. Jordan as an EPIRB salesman.

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I’m working my way deeper into Three-Eight Charlie, Jerrie Mock‘s book about her 1964 round-the-world trip in a single-engine Cessna. Mock’s route takes her through Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. All of the countries stifle private aviation with bureaucracy. It typically takes Mock 6 hours to get through flight planning, weather briefing, fee paying, fueling, immigration, and customs and be ready to depart.

Cairo:

We drove along the beautiful, wide, modern “Corniche” that runs along the eastern bank of the historic Nile. Across the broad, brown river, almost hidden by dusty haze, faint outlines of the giant pyramids could be seen between tall antenna towers and giant billboards …

Soon an efficient-looking gasoline truck with a Shell emblem appeared, complete with a crew of four, dressed in uniforms just like home. The crew chief didn’t speak Engligh, so I motioned to the airplane tanks and the AID man said something in Arabic. But instead of unwinding hoses and pumping gas into the airplane, they all stood around, waiting for something. After a while, I asked the translator why the men didn’t get started. “In a few minutes.” Peter Barker and I waited for a few minutes and then I asked again. “The ‘man’ is not here.” “Which ‘man’?” They shrugged. Finally I asked where he was. “Oh, we will call him.” One of the truck’s crew was sent into a nearby building. Nothing else happened, and the messenger didn’t return. He must have been trying to call the “man who wasn’t there” on another phone that didn’t work.

On the way home from the reception, we searched for the Marconi Overseas Communications Building, which would take my RCA credit card. Peter Barker had decided that the best way was to take a taxi, but the driver didn’t speak English and we spent about an hour going in what seemed to be circles and backtracking before we finally found the place. For some reason, the giant modern office is closed daily from two to six. I’m curious. It’s too late for lunch, too early for dinner, too long for a siesta, and it can’t be because of the afternoon heat, because the building is air-conditioned. I wonder what would happen to Wall Street if we tried that at home.

The U.A.R. is a country of contrasts. The government is racing to cover, in a few years, the distance between the ancient past when Egypt ruled the known world and the present, and to make the country into an industrial complex that will rival any in the atomic age. But in its headlong dash to impress, little details are overlooked. Just a few feet from me rose a giant, marble-tiled terminal building, equipped with the latest of air-conditioning, escalators, loud-speakers announcing arrivals and departures in five languages, a tower with a radio-communications system that worked, and surrounded with silver jets that could fly at speeds exceeding five hundred miles per hour. Beside all this magnificence sat the ridiculous-looking little barrel of gasoline that a dozen men couldn’t make work. A little private grass strip at home is expected to give better service.

When it came to paper work and polite conversation to kill time, the Egyptians were masters. But the airplane was a mystery to them.

Saudi Arabia:

Dhahran Airport may be the most beautiful in the world. Its gleaming concrete strip is 10,000 feet long, and the marble-columned terminal is a worthy reminder of the graceful grandeur of the Islamic architecture of the Taj Mahal. A U.S. Navy Blue Angel jet was taking off as I came into the traffic pattern. Several hundred white-robed people were crowded onto the broad steps of the terminal, waiting to see the first flying housewife to venture into this part of the world. As I climbed from the red-and-white plane and was presented with a huge bouquet of gladioli (they had been flown in from Cairo especially for me), they saw from my blue skirt that I truly must be a woman, and sent up a shout and applauded.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the most puritanical, or orthodox, of the Muslim countries, and the Islamic religion makes the laws of the country. From the time of the Prophet Mohammed, Arabian women have been hidden from all but their immediate families. They may not see, or be seen by, the outside world. To show one’s face or even wear bright clothes is a great sin. For a woman to drive a car in Arabia is not only wanton but prohibited by law, under penalty of her husbands being sent to jail. While European or American women are permitted to go in public unveiled, even they may not drive. So the men were puzzled. Probably no one had thought to make a law saying a woman couldn’t drive an airplane, but somehow the men thought it couldn’t be happening.

Then, in the excitement, one of them evaded the handsome airforce guards that Prince—later King—Faisal had sent to look after Charlie and me. He looked into the crowded cabin, saw the huge gasoline tanks that filled the inside of the plane, except for my one seat. His white-kaffiyeh-covered head nodded vehemently, and he shouted to the throng that there was no man. This brought a rousing ovation.

Despite the warm welcome of the Saudis, Mock was not tempted to join up as a permanent member: “It sounds terribly romantic, but as long as Islam rules the desert, I know that if I find a black camel-hair tent and venture in, I’ll be hidden behind the silken screen of the harem, with the other women, and my dinner will be the men’s leftovers.”

Pakistan:

No veils, although I guess some of the Muslim women in Pakistan still carry on the old tradition of purdah. This was the sixth country I visited where Islam is the state religion, but each place seemed to have its own way of obeying the Koran.

Karachi is the biggest city in Pakistan, with a population of over two million people [10 million today!], but much of its growth was a rapid expansion that occurred after it was made the capital of the new country in 1947.

The aircraft was not kept at Karachi International, but at a smaller field. To make a cross-country flight, one first went to the small field to get the plane and flew it over to the International Airport. Then followed the weather folder and flight-plan form, before they could leave. It was impossible to use either the airplane radio or a telephone for any of this. When they returned from the flight, they again went into the International Airport to close the flight plan in person, before returning to the Aero Club location. You could spend three hours on paper work for a hundred-mile flight.

Only yesterday, I had been on the far side of the Persian Gulf where the centuries-old attitudes say women aren’t allowed to drive a car. Today, after only four and a half hours of flying, I was in a completely different culture, equally Islamic, being shown through preflight procedures by two women pilots.

Mock observed that “The airplane is shrinking the world. People from different backgrounds and cultures are being thrown together, sometimes so quickly and briefly that they don’t have a chance to know each other. Hurt feelings can easily be caused by an innocent action.” A good thought to remember as Americans keep trying to control events in distant places with radically different cultures.

Related:

• posting #1 on this book

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ABC News interviewed me today for a 20/20 show that will air Friday (tomorrow) evening (10 pm Eastern). The topic was to what extent a mentally ill pilot can continue to work for an airline (previous posting on the subject) with some background on how pilots are screened and medically evaluated. I fear the by the time it is all edited there will be demands for more FAA regulation in an attempt to keep everyone perfectly safe (who can argue against that?). I wish that I had said that we are all our brother’s keeper to some extent. So yes either of the two people up front in a modern jet could send us into the ground (even just through incompetence!), but at the same time the safety record of airlines shows that our faith in our fellow men and women is not misplaced. And I did note that how can you be sure that the 17-year-old in the 6000 lb. SUV next to you on the highway is in a good mental place?

[Separately, I learned a few things about network broadcast journalism. ABC News captures in 720p on the theory that this somehow results in fewer motion artifacts for sports than 1080p. They used Sony cameras and Sennheiser and Lectrosonics wireless mics for this project. The crew consists of talent (Ryan Smith, a former attorney), a producer, a more senior producer listening from New York (via speakerphone tucked into the cameraman’s jacket), a cameraman, a sound engineer following behind the cameraman connected by cables (a camel-like arrangement). The idea was initially to film at Hanscom Field, a taxpayer-owned airport managed by Massport, but Massport management and media relations refused to allow ABC News onto the field (sort of odd that the public’s access to publicly owned property has been reduced in this manner, but this seems to be Massport’s general rule based on previous requests; this is an especially large reduction because at one time there were some TV station helicopters actually based on the field and therefore media were permitted to be present 24×7; I’m wondering how much of the rest of what happens in the U.S. is now walled off from the public by image-conscious government agencies.) So we flew over to a friend’s hangar at KLWM, a city-owned airport where they don’t have enough staff on the payroll to hassle journalists being escorted by hangar tenants. It took about 2 hours to get what will likely turn out to be 3 minutes of broadcast footage.]

Update: I heard from the producer that the story might end up on a different night and/or on Nightline.

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Inspired by meeting Matt Guthmiller, the youngest pilot ever to fly around the world, I’ve decided to dip into the classic around-the-world aviation literature. Three-Eight Charlie has been a $100 collectible until the 50th anniversary of this 1964 flight came around and now it is a $3 Kindle book. Jerrie Mock did the trip in 1964 in a Cessna 180 taildragger with no deicing gear. Mock had a Private certificate and a fresh instrument rating. Her 11-year-old plane was equipped with an autopilot but no deicing gear. What about the single engine in an age before CNC machine tools made everything mechanical more reliable?

It never hurts to have an extra. Except for engines. On a long flight, where the plane is overloaded, if one engine of a twin were to quit, a second one wouldn’t do much good. The average light twin isn’t much good at maintaining altitude when it’s loaded down …

The Cessna’s cabin tanks were full of gas, and the plane must have weighed almost 3,400 pounds—a lot more than the 2,500 pounds that it was normally licensed for. My ferry permit, from the U.S. Federal Aviation Agency, made the flight legal, but not necessarily safe. …

The autopilot does not seem to have been digital…

It was a funny feeling to sit there in the middle of the clouds, with nothing to look at beyond the red nose of the Cessna and know that the gyroscopes and pneumatic valves and bellows in the autopilot would take me safely to my destination.

Radio communications and navigation were in some ways the same 50 years ago and also completely different. Voice-over-VHF was used when reasonably near an airport, e.g., 50 miles away. Finicky HF was used when out over the ocean. VORs were new and ADFs were standard. The idiot-proof GPS and moving map was 30 years in the future. Mock was thus often lost:

[when flying from the Midwest to Bermuda on the first leg] I turned on the ADFs (Automatic Direction Finder) and tuned them to the Bermuda beacon. I was surprised and delighted to pick up a weak signal. I had hoped for long-range reception, but hadn’t really thought I could get a station this far away. But now what? The needles of the two sets were pointing 60 degrees apart! Which one was giving me a true bearing to the station?

Well, the number-one ADF hadn’t been disturbed, as far as I knew, so I decided to trust it. I wondered which direction the wind was blowing the plane. I knew I had a westerly tail wind, but was it from the southwest, west, or northwest? I was to have received that information from Kindley, but that was impossible without the HF radio.

Mock makes it to the Azores:

Then I noticed that the plane seemed to be slowing up. The airspeed had dropped off a little. Not much—but why? Was the plane climbing? No, it had lost altitude! I pushed in the throttle for more power. Was something wrong with the engine? Did I have carburetor ice? No. The engine instruments showed the proper amount of rpm and manifold pressure. And I was using enough carburetor heat to keep the Richter carburetor air temperature gauge in the green, indicating ice couldn’t form. Maybe I had forgotten to retrim the plane. I shut off the autopilot to see if that made any difference. No, the autopilot was OK. But something was certainly wrong. Even with the increased power, the plane didn’t want to hold altitude. And then I had a frightening thought. Ice! I found a flashlight and turned its beam on the strut outside my door. Ice! About an inch of it clung to the leading edge of the strut. Undoubtedly, as much, or more, would also be on the wings, although I couldn’t see them from inside the plane.

Where was Santa Maria? Ah, the beacon! “Three-Eight Charlie is over Sierra Mike Alfa.” I was cleared to make an ADF approach. I hoped I could remember how to do it. As I was making my procedural turn and starting inbound to the airport, I had a vague feeling that the headings were off a little. The compass maybe? Fortunately, the beacon was on the airport.

“Three-Eight Charlie. Don’t hit the mountains.” The controller sounded a little nervous.

If the Air Force men had been up all night, waiting for me, they showed no signs of weariness. I wished I looked as wide awake. One of the officers was General Boylan, and he explained that they had flown over from Lajes Air Force Base, on Terceira Island, about 150 miles away. He had a message from Gen. Robert Strauss at Lockbourne Air Force Base in Columbus. So! All this special attention from the Air Force was Bob Strauss’s work! General Boylan informed me that the ceiling had been one hundred feet when I landed. I didn’t tell him it was the first instrument approach I had ever made without an instructor.

So far I’ve only followed Mock to Casablanca but I’m enjoying the book as a reminder of just how adventurous some people were back in the old days.

Related:

• could Mock and Guthmiller’s courage-required trips be replicated by a cowardly 17-year-old?
• Aviation in the Muslim world back in the 1960s (second posting on this book)

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