Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Last weekend, I spent some time in the company of at least 4800 “mega-rich”:

 

(The hotel in Chicago has more than 1600 rooms.)

Are the mega-rich controlling the 2016 presidential election?

“Which Presidential Candidates Are Winning the Money Race” (New York Times, February 1, 2016) shows that Hillary Clinton has raised more than twice as much as Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush is the top choice of rich Republican-oriented donors. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has spent less than nearly all other candidates and raised $0 from “Super PACS.”

Now the results from Iowa are available. The voters were equally fond of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Jeb Bush received less than 3 percent of the vote.

Are the mega-rich controlling the election in some other way that isn’t measured by candidate fundraising and/or PAC spending? Or is it safe to say that Americans are not reliable puppets for the Koch brothers and the Clintons’ Wall Street and Silicon Valley friends?

[Separately, it seems that there is no reason to abandon my policy of (mostly) ignoring Donald Trump. He attracted less than 25 percent of one party’s vote and if any of the professional politicians quit the race their supporters will presumably be most likely to choose another professional politician, e.g., Ted Cruz. Maybe readers can explain why so many Americans, and even a lot of Europeans, wanted to talk about Trump-the-Candidate 24/7.]

Related:

• “Why bother to read news about the 2016 presidential election?” (April 2015 posting that failed to anticipate Bernie Sanders’s popularity)
• Donald Trump proves the “white male privilege” theory?
• Iowa family law (for calculating child support profits from any post-election sexual encounters between high-income visitors and natives)

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Department of Engineering Ideas that Work Great on Paper: “Do Planes Really Need Life Vests?” (WSJ, January 20, 2016) says “[life jackets] are so difficult to find under seats and put on securely in an emergency that only 33 passengers of 150 aboard US Airways Flight 1549 had a life vest after the plane splashed down in the Hudson River in 2009. Only four people managed to properly don their life vest, securing the waist strap so it wouldn’t pop off.”

[Separately, the article adds more weight to the legends of the crew: “Both Capt. Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles said they realized passengers had evacuated without life vests, so they grabbed a bunch from the cabin and handed them out after evacuating.” (Let’s also give three cheers to the WSJ reporter for not implying than an A320 is a single-pilot aircraft.)]

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“Do Elite Colleges Lead to Higher Salaries? Only for Some Professions” is a WSJ article by Eric Eide and Michael Hilmer, academic authors who studied the link between prestige of undergrad institution and mid-career earnings.

CS grads from four wildly disparate schools in a chart ended up earning roughly the same by mid-career. Here’s what the authors had to say about science/tech fields in general:

What we found startled us. For STEM-related majors, average earnings don’t vary much among the college categories. For example, we find no statistically significant differences in average earnings for science majors between selective schools and either midtier or less-selective schools. Likewise, there’s no significant earnings difference between engineering graduates from selective and less-selective colleges, and only a marginally significant difference between selective and midtier colleges.

Our findings are crucial for families to understand because chasing a prestigious STEM degree can leave students burdened with huge amounts of unnecessary debt. Financial aid can certainly help, but for many families, the cost of education can still differ dramatically across schools. For example, if an engineering student chose to attend the University of Pennsylvania instead of Texas A&M, the average starting salary would differ by less than $1,000, but the tuition difference would be over $167,000. At that slightly higher salary, you’d have to work for more than 150 years before you make up for that vast tuition difference.

The authors didn’t look at programmers without degrees. I wonder what they would have found if they’d studied people who started coding at age 18 rather than spend four years in college. Perhaps they would have significantly out-earned the college grads due to always having four additional years of work experience.

[Separately, the researchers may have left out an important factor: the wealth level of potential mates at different universities. From the introduction to Real World Divorce:

“When young people ask me about the law as a career,” said one litigator, “I tell them that in this country whom they choose to have sex with and where they have sex will have a bigger effect on their income than whether they attend college and what they choose as a career.”

From the history of divorce chapter:

What Weitzman did not predict is the tremendous variation in child support profits from state to state, despite the fact that federal law requires each state to follow a similar procedure in developing child support guidelines. How profitable can it be? A professor of economics in Massachusetts, a typical “winner take all” state, said “The best career advice that I could give to a female freshman would be to drop out and stop paying tuition. Get pregnant with a medical doctor this year. Get pregnant with a business executive two years from now. Get pregnant with a law firm partner two years after that. She’ll have three healthy kids and a much higher after-tax income than nearly all of our graduates in economics.”

Choosing a college where fellow undergraduates disproportionately come from rich families and where the campus is located in a state featuring the highest profits from short-term marriages and/or out-of-wedlock pregnancies could result in a high return on the tuition investment. It is easier to meet and have sex with a rich college kid if one is a student at the same college. (See also “Assembling a longer-term annuity from child support via frozen embryos”) Of course, majoring in CS is probably not the best choice if one is going to pursue wealth through sexual encounters…]

 

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I haven’t followed Donald Trump too closely due to my dual theories that

1) an amateur cannot win a party’s nomination

2) a Republican cannot win a general election with a large turnout

This analysis of the Trump phenomenon by a Washington insider is interesting, however, even if Trump himself is not. Here are some excerpts:

Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted.

Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents “an existential threat to conservatism.”

Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal.

If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it’s hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don’t go to public school. You don’t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It’s all good.

Separately from this fun piece of writing… I think that Trump’s relative popularity can be attributed to the fact that the professional politicians in the Republican race are so numerous. Thus the multiple professionals, who are barely distinguishable to the average voter, each get only a fraction of the people who want to vote for a professional politician while Trump gets 100 percent of the voters who prefer an amateur.

[Separately, let’s not forget that if that Nantucket job results in a pregnancy with a high-income visitor, there could be 23 years of lucrative payments (minimum total: $1 million, tax-free) under Massachusetts family law or a $250,000 to $500,000 abortion sale.]

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A friend’s Facebook status:

This is what inequality looks like: Yesterday I’m accosted in the Whole Foods parking lot by a woman asking me for a dollar to buy a sandwich. I grumpily refused. A poignant moment for me, another rejection out of too many to count for her. What a world [frowny emoticon] [link to Atlantic article on rich bastards worldwide]

This guy is a software engineer married to a Harvard professor. His household income is approximately $300,000 per year. He tirelessly advocates on Facebook for higher taxes on the “wealthy” and for the election of Bernie Sanders. Yet he apparently refused to redistribute 1/300,000th of his household’s income to the beggar. In other words, he rejected a 0.00033… percent increase in his personal tax rate.

[You might reasonably ask why there are beggars in Cambridge, Massachusetts given that a non-working adult can get a free apartment, free food, free health care, etc. Certainly there are poor families receiving packages of assistance that work out to more than $100,000 per year after tax, e.g., starting with free occupancy of an apartment with a market value of $5,000 per month. However, a person who has not been favored by the various government poverty ministries and/or is bad at paperwork might find himself or herself with only free health care.]

I asked about the apparent logical contradiction between his political advocacy and his personal actions. He responded with “A $1.00 donation to a random bum in a parking lot is not equivalent to a tax increase.” His friend who is also a passionate Bernie Sanders supporter added “I have been trained to wonder if panhandlers use monetary donations to prolong unhealthy dependence of substances” to explain why he won’t give money voluntarily.

I then asked “Why couldn’t a welfare recipient just as easily use the taxpayer cash to ‘prolong unhealthy dependence of substances’? If you give me a free apartment, free food, and free health care, what stops me from spending the day doing whatever I want, e.g., smoking crack?” Neither he nor his fellow Bernie Sanders supporter had an answer for that. Instead they talked about wanting to “give people a guaranteed minimum income.” I responded with “Why not start with the woman at Whole Foods then? Her current guaranteed minimum income is $0 (though she may be able to receive an array of goods and services, such as food, housing, and medical care). If you gave her $1 then her guaranteed minimum income would be $1.”

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For about the third time during my 52 years, human life on Planet Earth is coming to an end. First it was nuclear war, then it was AIDS, now it is the Zika virus.

Perhaps a vaccine will be found one day, unless it turns out that this virus, like most others, is smarter than humans. Killing all of the world’s mosquitoes with a massive one-time dose of DDT would be great, except the mosquitoes also turned out to be smarter than humans (see this paper on genetic resistance to DDT).

Here’s a question for readers: Are there long-term effects from this virus? (New York Times says “no” but the paper has been known to be wrong…)

Given that the virus is spread by mosquitoes, where could a person go to escape the virus? Hawaii would have been ideal, except that Europeans began trashing the place in 1826 with this pest. (Pregnant women should watch out, though, because child support is quasi-capped at $72,000 per year.)

Can the virus survive if the mosquito population is dormant for most of the year? If not, that would make mostly tax-free Alaska a potential choice, except that one human visitor from the Lower 48 in May could reinfect the state? (Pregnant woman: watch out that you don’t end up like Bristol Palin as an actual target of a child support lawsuit under Alaska’s gender-neutral laws.)

How about a desert? There were no mosquitoes at Burning Man! Unfortunately, it seems that there are some in income tax-free Las Vegas (source). (Pregnant women: Nevada has the least lucrative child support system in the United States. Though more profitable than in Europe, the cash value of a child in Nevada might be 1/10th or even 1/100th of the potential revenue in Massachusetts or California.) Arizona and New Mexico have plenty of areas that seem too dry for mosquitoes, but pregnant women whose income is or might become higher than the fathers’ would need to be aware that they could become child support lawsuit targets in Arizona due to the 50/50 shared parenting default.

What about staying cold all year? Spend the winter in Alaska or in Jackson, Wyoming (neither state has an income tax). Spend the Northern Hemisphere summer in southern Chile or Argentina?

Go to a true desert? Take a job working on a telescope in the Atacama Desert? Or head to the South Pole?

Can we invest on this trend? Even if Las Vegas is not completely mosquito-free, could this be what finally gives a lift to Vegas real estate? Can we short Brazilian Olympics tickets?

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Footnote (2012) seems like an ideal movie for people involved with academia and/or parents whose children are in similar fields of endeavor. Who else loved it?

One thing that I enjoyed about the movie is that there are some loose ends. We never figure out the significance of the extra woman. We never learn what the bigshot professor knows about the father.

[Yes, it seems that I am at least four years behind the cool kids.]

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“Why Female Professors Get Lower Ratings” (NPR) contains a true gem regarding an experiment conducted in France:

Overall, there was no correlation between students rating their instructors more highly and those students actually learning more.

[Note that it doesn’t seem as though the researchers, university teachers themselves, considered the hypothesis that university teachers have no consistent effect on student learning outcomes, which would certainly explain the above result.]

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The New York Times has an article about Baltimore’s murder rate in 2015: 55 per 100,000. Looking at Worldbank data for 2013, if Baltimore were its own country, it would be the world’s second most dangerous.

[Separately, for math and statistics nerds, the article is interesting because it is missing the seemingly simplest explanation for why the murder rate in Baltimore has climbed: as the population falls, the people who have moved out are disproportionately the ones in careers that don’t require occasional murders while people who have moved in are disproportionately those engaged in illegal activities where business disputes cannot be resolved through the courts. The seed of this idea is in the article: “Unfortunately, many of our victims are involved in the illegal drug trade or involved in illegal activity.”]

Related:

• interview with Jill Carter, a state legislator representing Baltimore, in the Maryland chapter of Real World Divorce

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“U.S. Economy Grew Anemic 0.7% in Fourth Quarter” is a WSJ article on the latest GDP numbers for our country. The headline is inaccurate because the economy grew at a 0.7 percent annual rate during the fourth quarter. The actual “growth” was thus 0.175 percent.

Nowhere does the article mention the population size. If the population grew by more than 0.175 percent during the quarter, the per-capita GDP actually fell. If the popular shrank, on the other hand, then each of us is potentially significantly richer (though perhaps the evil Koch brothers can take all of the growth for themselves!).

“U.S. Economy Barely Grew Last Quarter, Stoking Concerns About Momentum in 2016” is the New York Times equivalent story and it has the same omission (though at least they don’t have the arithmetic wrong in the headline).

The CIA Factbook says that the growth rate is 0.78%. Thus, adjusted to a per-capita basis, the U.S. economy was shrinking slightly during the fourth quarter of last year. Considering the lack of cold and snow in the Northeast, which ordinarily would have given the economy a boost, the core shrinkage rate was probably higher.

Assuming that the CIA and Department of Commerce numbers are both correct, why would we be congratulating ourselves for a growing economy when in fact we have a shrinking economy from the perspective of the average resident?

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