Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

“Why Americans—Especially Women—Are Drinking More Alcohol” (TIME, 2017) was recently highlighted by a Facebook friend because of this passage:

Added stress is another factor that might drive anyone, regardless of their sex, to drink more. High-risk drinking was higher among minority groups, and the authors argue that wealth inequality between minorities and whites has widened during and after the 2008 recession, which may have led to “increased stress and demoralization.” Income and educational disparities, as well as “unemployment, residential segregation, discrimination, decreased access to health care, and increased stigma associated with drinking,” may also play a role, the authors write.

In other words, some Americans are so poor now that they have no choice but to spend gobs of money on beer, wine, and mixed drinks.

I wonder how much of the extra drinking could be accounted for by heavier weights. Americans today can be 50 lbs. heavier than their counterparts from the 1950s. A person with 50 lbs. of extra weight will need additional alcohol to feel the same effect, no?

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A bunch of readers have sent me “Alberta man changes gender on government IDs for cheaper car insurance” (CBC). But this $1,100 (Canadian) hero was not a pioneer.

“Man legally changes his gender to identify as a woman ‘so he can retire five years earlier’ in Argentina” (Daily Mail, March 2018):

Sergia Lazarovich, 60, a government worker from the northern province of Salta, applied to change her gender in June last year, having lived for decades as Sergio.

The change was approved recently but a relative has since come forward to accuse Sergia of lying and trying to cheat the pension system.

Argentinian law allows any person to change their gender on identity documents to match their self-perception, without having to provide evidence of hormone treatment or gender reassignment surgery.

The law also allow women to retire on a state pension aged 60, whereas men have to wait until age 65.

Sergia has been in multiple heterosexual relationships including with the mother of her two children to whom she was married for 25 years.

She has never expressed an interest in men, and continued dating women even after registering for the change, the relative said.

Sergia has also never expressed an interest in living as a woman before and even made disparaging comments about gays and transsexuals, the relative claimed.

Confronted by the statement, Sergia accused newspapers of printing lies and said the decision to change genders was personal.

‘The motivations are mine and I do not have to explain anything to anyone,’ he told the El Tribuno newspaper.

Spanish-speaking readers: How is Sergia doing? Has she joined the Check of the Month club down in Salta?

Related:

• You can pay McKinsey to run a quota system at your company (discusses options such as paying workers to change gender ID)

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Parents who are gearing up for college application season will be cheered to learn that Ivy League graduates frequently ask local friends if their 6th grade gender-typically dressed boy-girl twins are identical or fraternal. Due to the parents having attended Harvard and our location being proximate to Harvard, many of the folks asking this question have at least one Harvard degree.

[This would not be a poor reflection on $500,000+ in education (private school plus Ivy League tuition) if we assume that the questioners are refusing to make cisgender-normative assumptions. The twins could have been  identical (though they do look different) and then one decided on a gender transition. Separately, why isn’t it “sororal twins” as an alternative to “identical”?]

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We’ve been improving our minds lately by watching The Jetsons (aired in 1962; set in 2062), streaming on Amazon Boomerang. Some interesting items so far…

• the first episode has a reference to immigration; Mr. Spacely’s wife is involved in a “Martians Go Home!” campaign
• people still use paper currency
• Jane was 18 years old when she gave birth to Judy
• the writers did not foresee any changes to American family culture: nobody is gay, nobody is transgender, there are no never-married “single mothers,” nobody is divorced
• the writers did not foresee any changes to American diet. Machines prepare bacon and eggs for breakfast. International travel is supersonic, but there is no market for a restaurant serving the cuisine of a formerly exotic destination. Nobody is vegan, has a nut allergy, or asks for gluten-free pizza.
• there is a home computer, but no network, so the digital newspaper has to be delivered as a USB stick (packet switching was developed at roughly the same time as The Jetsons)

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We attended a semi-Orthodox Bar Mitzvah last month. Although we were happy to see our friend’s 13-year-old move onward and upward, the Bar Mitzvah is inevitably embedded within a long service in Hebrew. Young people of my generation were accustomed to managing boredom. But how can kids today sit through two hours of mumbling in what to them is an unintelligible language? They transition from an exciting phone or tablet game to staring blankly and daydreaming?

I wonder if Judaism and similar religions can survive the smartphone age.

Readers: What do you think? Public schools can continue to operate in an arbitrarily boring manner because children are required by law to show up and teachers are entitled to lifetime pay regardless of outcomes. But there is no law requiring young people to show up to a synagogue rather than stay home with Xbox and no law requiring parents to keep paying the rabbis. Judaism has survived for about 4,000 years, so it seems rash to forecast its demise, but we’re only in roughly Year 8 of the ubiquitous smartphone age.

Related:

• Facebook is bad for us (one of my posts on the book iGen, chronicling big changes since the introduction of the iPhone)

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I was talking to a venture capitalist the other day and he mentioned that his tax rate had gone up dramatically for 2018. Was it due to Massachusetts property taxes no longer being deductible? No. Buried in the Trump tax bill was an end to the multi-decade “carried interest” party in which private equity, venture capital, and real estate investors have been able to pay long-term capital gains rates on money that certainly seems like ordinary income (e.g., the managers of these funds don’t put any of their own money at risk in these investments so they are just getting paid for doing their jobs, presumably).

It used to be that the holding period was one year before the manager could claim the capital gains rate. Now it is three years and Massachusetts is imposing a 10 percent tax rate of its own.

See “2017 tax reform enacts a three-year holding period rule for carried interests” (Baker Tilly, a big accounting firm) for more on this.

Could it be that Donald Trump will be remembered as the president least cozy with Wall Street?

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“Hungary Pulls Out of U.N. Global Migration Agreement” (nytimes):

Hungary pulled out of a United Nations global agreement on migration on Wednesday, citing security concerns, just days after the accord was reached.

Hungary joined the United States as one of two United Nations members that are not committing to the agreement, the first of its kind to lay out international standards for countries to address migration.

As with “Germans shutting down immigration because they are tired of getting wealthier and enjoying lower crime rates?”, Hungary apparently doesn’t want to get richer and safer via immigration.

As a proud Econ 101 veteran (plus some graduate courses too!), I like market-based solutions to perceived problems. “If countries won’t take refugees for moral reasons, let’s give them financial incentives” is by a couple of law school professors, but it has an economics angle and sort of proposes a market.

What if we depended less on potential host nations’ humanitarian impulses, and instead created a system that appealed to their economic self-interest? What if nations’ perceived self-interest could be better aligned with the humanitarian needs of refugees?

We begin with three basic propositions: Countries that create refugees can and should pay a price for it, countries that take them in can and should be paid for it, and refugees can and should have a say in where they go. Those three principles suggest a possible solution: We would allow refugees to assert a financial claim against the governments that have persecuted them, and also—if they wish—to trade that claim (a kind of “refugee debt”) to a host nation, thereby lessening the economic resistance and giving them some control over their own fates.

Oddly, these guys assume that the price for a refugee should be negative rather than positive. Politicians tell us that even the lowest-skilled immigrants make existing citizens of a country way better off. Yet here these guys say that “countries that take them in can and should be paid for it”. Why should countries get paid to do something that is guaranteed to enrich them?

Readers: What do you know about this grand new U.N. solution and why Hungary and the U.S. are staying out?

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Internet was supposed to enable individual authors to reach an audience and get paid. For example, see this distributed system conceived by Robert Kahn, of TCP/IP fame, in a patent filed in 1993 (6,135,646).

The technology that was supposed to decentralize commerce and media instead led to a much tighter concentration. Most ad revenue goes through Google or Facebook. The local newspaper has died while the New York Times captures a larger (and ever-more-outraged?) national audience. Nasim Aghdam had no practical way of getting paid for her media productions other than going through YouTube. When the righteous folks at YouTube decided that they didn’t like her content and “demonetized” her, the Iranian refugee went on a shooting spree at the YouTube HQ.

In a world where robots, perhaps overseen by a few low-wage humans in countries where their understanding of English and American culture is limited, can demonetize, doesn’t the long-term trend favor the biggest publishers? A traditional big media newspaper or TV station won’t be demonetized because there is too much at stake for a Google, Facebook, YouTube, et al. They can write something inflammatory or edgy and even if a robot misinterprets it the ads still display. But there is no real financial consequence to Google from demonetizing an individual author (see Ann Althouse’s personal tale, for example).

Except maybe for people whose production is limited to cat videos, does this mean that in the long run we will only be able to see material that has been filtered through the biggest (and primarily the traditional) media outlets?

Related:

• How was the refugee immigration of Nasim Najafi Aghdam supposed to work out?

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I am awesome at predicting the future of the stock market. I can tell you that there will be a crash at some point within the next few years. I just can’t give you the exact date…

But seriously, the S&P 500 is carrying a fairly high P/E ratio, isn’t it? Even if we allow for a “Trump bump” due to the lower corporate income tax rate?

Index funds are susceptible to corruption by companies about which investors are wildly enthusiastic, e.g., Tesla, Apple, Facebook, et al. I’m wondering why it isn’t easier to buy a profit-weighted index fund. See this article from 2003 on the subject, which claims a 59 percent outperformance compared to the S&P using hypothetical back-testing. But now there are some actual ETFs that try this approach, notably from WisdomTree (EXT, EPS, EZM, EES), started in 2007. Their EPS fund, since inception, has tracked the S&P 500 (SPTR) pretty closely, actually with slight underperformance (maybe due to the higher expense ratio of 0.28% versus around 0.1% for an S&P index?).

Readers: What do you know and/or think about this approach to index-based investing? Why isn’t the performance more different from dumb-as-bricks indexing? It can’t be that markets are efficient, can it?

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