A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
One of the cases in which I am a software expert witness was recently dismissed with prejudice (it would be nice to say that this was due to my brilliant analysis of the technology, but it was actually due to fraud by the plaintiff in presenting evidence). The seasoned defense litigator who hired me (two years ago!): “This was a rare instance of justice in the [***] state court system.”
Full post, including commentsHad MacKenzie Bezos married and divorced Jeff Bezos in Germany, checking the “separate property” box on the marriage application, she would be getting no asset transfer, only child support that maxes out at $6,000 per child per year (see Real World Divorce‘s international chapter).
Had the divorce happened in California, she would have been entitled to 50 percent of the assets accumulated during the marriage, a total of about $72 billion.
The divorce occurred while the family courts of Washington State had jurisdiction, however, resulting in “MacKenzie Bezos’s $36 billion in Amazon stock from divorce settlement makes her world’s fourth-richest woman” (MarketWatch).
In the early articles on this subject, Washington was erroneously reported by many journalists as being a 50/50 property division state. In fact, as noted in Real World Divorce,
Are the assets split 50/50? “We’re a ‘fair and equitable’ state,” says DeVallance. “It is not a 50/50 state. The property division can be a disproportionate.” Does the fact that Washington State is a “community property” jurisdiction mean that assets acquired before the marriage remain with each party? “No,” explains DeVallance. “All property is before the court, including separate property, though it is somewhat rare to invade separate property.”
In other words, it is uncertain. A judge might have decided to give Mrs. Bezos more than 50 percent of the property, on the grounds that she hadn’t worked since 1997 and therefore wouldn’t be as easily able as Mr. Bezos to earn more money. Or a judge might have decided that $1 billion was the maximum profit that someone should be able to obtain from being a stay-at-home spouse. There wouldn’t have been any precedent for these numbers.
It would appear that a certain $36 billion was preferred by Mrs. Bezos to the possibility of obtaining $72 billion or more, but with a small risk of getting much less than $36 billion. Thus, she settled, and, assuming that she was most likely to come away with $72 billion, we can say that the price of the uncertainty that the Washington State Legislature built into the family law system was $36 billion.
Generally I think it is more important for ordinary people to learn about more ordinary applications of family law, but the MacKenzie Bezos story is interesting as an illustration of the strange characteristic of U.S. family law. Marriage is primarily a financial partnership in the eyes of the law and yet, in most states, the value of an individual’s stake in the partnership is unknown and unknowable without spending potentially all of the partnership value on years of litigation. It is kind the opposite of all other American business partnerships where the value is supposed to be readily ascertained at any time and litigation is a rare last resort if something has gone badly wrong.
Full post, including commentsSome numbers that I heard at Harvard Medical School:
Declining? With half of the new glass towers in Boston and Cambridge packed with biologists and chemists? “It’s getting tougher to approve new drugs because they have to be safe, be effective, and be somehow better for an average population of patients than current drugs,” said my source. “Don’t get me started on the FDA. These criteria are probably too strict. A compound that has bad side effects for one person might affect another person very differently. So it would be good to have more options, especially for those with unusual genetics.”
Full post, including comments“Dismay after Trump moves to cut aid to Central America” (BBC):
Mr Trump ordered the suspension of aid payments to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to push their governments to stop migration into the US.
If we let anyone who sets foot on U.S. soil enter the asylum process, how is it El Salvador’s fault that people leave to take advantage of what is likely to be a lifetime of means-tested housing, health care, and food welfare?
What do we want them to do? Build a wall to keep their own citizens in? So that a future Reagan-like U.S. president can implore them to tear the wall down?
The article says
Aid advocates argue that the best way to stem migration from the region is to stimulate economic development
But as noted in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/03/13/if-liberals-wont-enforce-borders-fascists-will/, it may well be that as the source countries get wealthier there be more asylum-seekers. From the quoted Atlantic article:
immigration is accelerating so rapidly in the 21st century less because of pervading misery than because life on our planet is improving for so many people. It costs money to move—and more and more families can afford the investment to send a relative northward.
Maybe we should cut off foreign aid because it is generally harmful to foreigners, but I don’t see how it makes sense to cut off aid to countries whose citizens are smart enough to show up in the U.S. for the unlimited lifetime welfare buffet.
Is it truly the case that the Land of Freedom (TM) is asking Central American countries to imprison their own citizens?
Full post, including commentsPlaying around with R (bleah) and NHANES data (a comprehensive survey of American health and socioeconomic situation; see also this exploration tool at Harvard Medical School), I got a few surprises…
American women actually have a slightly higher average BMI than men. Muscles are supposedly heavier than fat and men are supposedly more muscular, right? This theory is not supported by data. Given two random adults of the same height, the woman will actually be heavier.
One of our fellow residents (might not be a citizen) rang up a BMI of 120(!). Plenty of company in the 50-60 range…
There is almost no correlation between income and BMI. However, the correlation is in an unexpected direction. An increase in income of 6X seems to result in an increase in BMI of about 1. The rich are not thinner. (NHANES may not be a good sample for the truly rich).
Full post, including commentsFrom my 2008 post about A Farewell to Alms:
[economics professor Gregory] Clark starts with a defense of Malthus. In most societies at most times in human history, Malthus was right. The population expanded until everyone was living at a subsistence level. Given an improvement in technology or health care the long-term result was not that people on average had an improved standard of living, but rather a population of increased size living at an even lower material standard. You had to be robust in filthy Europe to survive infections, but even an underfed weakling was relatively safe from disease in hygienic Japan and China. The consequence was that China and Japan were more densely populated and strikingly poor by European standards right up to the Industrial Revolution.
Population growth combined with personal income growth is an anomaly, according to Malthus and Clark. The U.S. population has been growing steadily in recent years and our average inhabitant is no better educated than before. Politicians stand up and angrily ask why average personal income hasn’t grown. The real question is why average personal income hasn’t shrunk.
The past 100 years hasn’t fit Malthus well, perhaps due to the Green Revolution and tapping into fossil fuels on an industrial scale for the first time. But maybe Malthus is being proved right by the real estate market?
As noted previously here, a friend said that his daughter was “making a ton of money” at Goldman. It then transpired that the young woman couldn’t afford an apartment on her own, even spending half of her after-tax income. The “ton of money” was entirely captured by Manhattan landlords, reducing the young lady to the same standard of living as an entry-level office worker in Manhattan circa 1960.
“Affordable Housing Crisis Spreads Throughout World” (WSJ, April 2, 2019):
Across 32 major cities around the world, real home prices on average grew 24% over the last five years, while average real income grew by only 8% over the same period, according to Knight Frank, a London-based real-estate consulting firm. Economists say it is striking that affordability has worsened even during a period of global prosperity over the last six years. But income growth has been unable to keep pace with a rapid run-up in home prices.
Americans often blame local policies, e.g., zoning regulations, for the inability of today’s median-income urban residents (among a population of 330 million) to afford what would have been considered a normal-sized apartment back in 1970 (U.S. population 205 million). But the WSJ article shows that the trend is consistent almost everywhere in the world. Tokyo is a notable exception, which the authors attribute to a free market in housing (why not to the lack of Malthusian population growth? Japan has roughly the same number people today compared to 30 years ago).
Readers: What do you think? In 1910, Haber and Bosch came up with a clever trick for a dramatic boost in agricultural production. So it looked like Malthus was wrong. But there haven’t been any clever tricks for boosting the production of housing, so we’ll have 8 well-fed urbanites sharing a 2BR apartment originally built to accommodate 1-2 people. Can we rely on robots to get us out of this? Human population can expand exponentially while maintaining a high standard of living because solar-powered robots will be able to build residential skyscrapers at ridiculously low prices?
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“The United Kingdom Has Gone Mad; The problem with holding out for a perfect Brexit plan is that you can’t fix stupid.” (nytimes) is by Thomas Friedman, a guy whom nobody can accuse of being stupid (he married the daughter of a billionaire and lives (large) in Maryland, an awesome jurisdiction for divorce litigants who can claim to be the less wealthy spouse).
What I can’t figure out how it is logically consistent for Americans to criticize the Brits for wanting to be independent and fully sovereign. We spend way more money on our military than would be necessary to prevent an invasion from Canada or Mexico. Why are we spending that money if not to preserve full sovereignty and not have to listen to anyone else in the world?
From a strictly dollars and cents point of view, if being part of the E.U. is so great,why doesn’t the U.S. seek to join? In our age of telecommunications, container shipping, and air travel (preferably by Airbus!), geography should not be a barrier.
If we want to say that anyone in the UK who opposes EU membership is “stupid”, as the giant brains of the NY Times have concluded, shouldn’t we also be trying to become part of the EU ourselves?
Full post, including comments“What Americans Know About Science” (Pew Research) is subtitled “Science knowledge levels remain strongly tied to education; Republicans and Democrats are about equally knowledgeable,” but it turns out that “equal” translates to “Republicans know more”:
Republicans and independents who lean to the Republican Party average seven correct answers, while Democrats and independents who lean to the Democratic Party average 6.6.
A difference of 0.4 doesn’t sound huge, right? But the difference between Americans with postgraduate degrees and bachelor’s degrees was only 0.6. Being a Republican was worth about the same as two years of graduate school.
Considering that Democrats have branded themselves the “Party of Science” while decrying the purported anti-science idiocy of Republicans, these data are interesting.
Even more interesting is why we continue to have faith in our unique capacity to solve the world’s science and engineering problems. When a politician proposes a reduction in the growth of government spending on grants to science labs (not an actual cut, of course, though a lower growth rate will be characterized by “scientists” as a “cut”), the reaction includes statements that this will mean the end of scientific progress. This necessarily assumes that scientific discoveries can be made only in the U.S.
Global warming? Only Americans can help! This has the same logical basis as Tom Cruise explaining that a car accident calls for a Scientologist. It won’t be Chinese and German engineers who come up with improved solar cells, wind turbines, batteries, and CO2 vacuums. (After all, the fundamentals were all developed in the U.S. It was American Edmond Becquerel, working in a Paris, Texas lab, who discovered the photovoltaic effect; American Albert Einstein later explained the photoelectric effect while working in Zurich, Kansas.)
Who are these Americans ready to help solve the world’s toughest problems? Fully 39 percent of us know that a “base” is the opposite of an “acid”. Plainly we are going to be experts on the carbon cycle and atmospheric CO2 washing out into carbonic acid. Americans can do even better when adjusting for the sun’s influence on climate, since 63 percent of us know that the tilt of the Earth is responsible for the seasons (survey methodology).
Full post, including commentsA friend’s son got a call the other day from the woman who’d divorced him a year earlier (wedding planning and uncontested divorce legal proceedings combined lasted far longer than the marriage itself). She had found a higher-income sex partner at some point during the brief marriage and it seems that she’d given birth to a child 13 months after a divorce agreement was approved by a judge (this kind of divorce-by-agreement rather than actual litigation happens about 17 percent of time in the county that we sampled within Massachusetts (statistical study for Middlesex)).
The divorce didn’t become final until 120 days following the approval by the judge and Massachusetts presumes that a child born within 300 days of the technical end of a marriage is the responsibility of the ex-husband. A birth certificate application with the new husband’s name on it as the father had been rejected (tough to believe that all of these town and county record-keeping systems are linked!).
The new mom wanted her discarded former husband to sign an Affidavit of Nonpaternity. The situation turns out to be sufficiently common that there is a standard form.
(It wouldn’t have made great financial sense for her to try to collect 23 years of child support from this guy given his low-ish income and the fact that a DNA test might get him off the hook, but marrying the lover/biological father and collecting from the ex-husband can work; see “Post-Divorce Litigation” for a link to a NY Times article about an example situation:
“I pay child support to a biologically intact family,” Mike told me, his voice cracking with incredulity. “A father and mother, married, who live with their own child. And I pay support for that child. How ridiculous is that?”
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It turns out that a powerful Vestas wind turbine can be purchased for $199 on Amazon.com.
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