Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Goebbels: A Biography shows how much damage can be done by misconceptions regarding economics. The private diaries of Goebbels indicate that the National Socialist leaders of Germany believed that natural resources were the only and/or primary foundation for a nation’s wealth. For people coming of age in the early part of the 20th century, this made sense. Argentina was rich, the United States was rich, Russia was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, England was rich based on natural resources acquired through her empire. The modern examples of resource-poor countries becoming rich via intelligence, education, and hard work did not exist. South Korea and Taiwan did not exist as technology centers. Switzerland was not the industrial leader (and richer per capita than the U.S.) that it is today.

Here are some excerpts from the book showing what German leaders believed regarding how to achieve prosperity:

In the middle of October Goebbels published an article in Das Reich in which, along the same lines as Hitler’s remarks, rather than focusing on ideological differences he commented in a relatively pragmatic way on the “war aims” for which this continuing conflict was being fought: “This time it’s not about throne and altar but about grain and oil, about space for our growing numbers, who cannot live and cannot be fed in the restricted territory in which they have had to stay up until now.”

With the aim of winning the population’s support for the forthcoming military efforts, at the end of May he published an editorial in Das Reich with the title “What’s It All For?” In it, while not outlining actual political war aims, he nevertheless tried to give “the ordinary man” a foretaste of life in a future Greater German Reich. Concerned to persuade his readers of the rosy prospects that lay ahead, he produced a kitsch vision of the postwar world: “We are dreaming of a happy people in a country blossoming with beauty, traversed by wide roads like bands of silver which are also open to the modest car of the ordinary man. Beside them lie pretty villages and well laid-out cities with clean and roomy houses inhabited by large families for whom they provide sufficient space. In the limitless fields of the east yellow corn is waving, enough and more than enough to feed our people and the whole of Europe. Work will once more be a pleasure and it will be marked by a joy in life which will find expression in brilliant parties and contemplative peace.”

On the following day Goebbels took part in a meeting of Reich leaders and Gauleiters at which Hitler made a three-hour speech in order to convince this small group of elite functionaries of his own confidence in victory; the alternative to “total victory” was “total destruction.” The aims of this war, Hitler concluded, were very wide-ranging and would require many more sacrifices; however, these would be justified since the war “would make possible the lives of millions of German children.

The excerpts above also show how wrong politicians can be about the long-term goals of the citizens who elected them. The National Socialists talked about “clean and roomy houses inhabited by large families” and “our growing numbers,” just a few decades before the birthrate among ethnic Germans plummeted.

Related:

• Germany wins World War I… 100 years later

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This article on a new middle school next to our flight school has some interesting numbers. Assuming that it is completed within budget, it will cost “$34 million for the 85,000-square-foot, 310-student middle school.” That’s $400 per square foot and $110,000 per student. The latter number is interesting because our “per-pupil spending” numbers typically don’t include the capital costs of school buildings. If we assume a 30-year life for the building (the article says that the discarded school had a major renovation in 1988), and use a 4% interest rate, that would be a $5,725/year mortgage payment. In other words, if the quoted-to-taxpayers amount of spending is $20,000 per year per student (chart; scroll down to find “Lincoln”), the real number for these middle-schoolers is $25,725.

One thing that would be interesting to study is academic achievement during the period in which students were taught in the “nearby temporary facilities” mentioned in the article. What if it turns out that the particulars of the building have no effect at all on academics?

Related:

• Touring the Mediocrity Factory (meeting with principal of rich suburban public school)

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I asked a divorce litigator what she thought of “The Marriages of Power Couples Reinforce Income Inequality” (a economics professor’s Christmas Eve New York Times article on Americans’ mating decisions):

As it becomes harder for many people to “marry up” as a path for income mobility for themselves or their children, families that are not well connected may feel disengaged, and the significant, family-based advantages for some children may discourage others from even trying.

A study of Denmark by Gustaf Bruze, a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, showed that about half of the expected financial gain of attending college derived not from better job prospects but from the chance to meet and marry a higher-earning spouse.

The response from the world where street smarts are more important than degrees?

“If you can’t get into a college that graduates investment bankers, you can make just as good money by banging an investment banker, preferably one who is already married.”

(See “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage” for some of the practicalities.)

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A friend is an investment banker helping restructure the ownership and financing of a group of nightclubs. She said that nightclubs own or rent valuable real estate that may be used as few as three nights per week. There is a certain amount of revenue from rental for private events, but that is also mostly in the evenings.

Some of the highest profit margins in the real estate world are at co-working spaces, which may also be characterized as “startup company incubators.” Given the tendency of people to work during the daytime and party at night, why not use the otherwise vacant nightclub real estate during the daytime as a co-working space? Put in some crazy fast WiFi, have a side room where the Aeron chairs can be stashed, and then offer people co-work space at a discount if they’ll agree to vacate by 7 pm.

Where’s the flaw in this idea?

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A friend of a friend is an immigration official in the Netherlands. As measured by departures and re-entries at Schiphol, where do successful asylum-seekers go on vacation? The answer turns out to be that they go, with spouse and children, back to the country in which they were supposedly at risk of violence, imprisonment, and harassment from the government.

[Note that this is not very different from what happened with the Tsarnaev family. They received asylum in the U.S. based on their fear of “deadly persecution” in Russia. But then both parents voluntarily returned to their original home in the Russian province of Dagestan (CNN), leaving four children to be supported by U.S. taxpayers.]

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“Missing U.S. Missile Shows Up in Cuba” is a WSJ article about how the U.S. government mistakenly shipped a Lockheed Martin Hellfire missile to Cuba. What if the shipment wasn’t a mistake? What better way to bankrupt and disable a military opponent than getting them signed up as a customer for Lockheed Martin?

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Godiva’s European web site admits that they leave the industrial process of turning cocoa beans into couverture to professionals at an unnamed giant corporation:

The enrobing chocolate, dark, milk or white is specially prepared for Godiva following their own recipe. Everything is decided by Godiva: the choice of cocoa beans, the degree of roasting, the fineness of grinding, the purity and the homogeneity of the chocolate paste, which is refined by conching…

Maybe the Turkish owner of Godiva does this?

Certainly Godiva is not on the Wikipedia list of bean-to-bar companies.

The U.S. site, however, implies that Godiva makes its own chocolate:

Our cocoa beans are sourced directly from the cocoa farmers, who have a commitment to cultivating the highest quality cocoa beans. .. GODIVA takes care to grind the nibs into extremely fine particle

Could it be that Godiva has a secret bean-to-block factory in the U.S. that supplies its U.S. bonbon factory? Or do they simply think that Americans can’t understand the fine points?

Related:

• Mast Brothers chocolate?

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“Despite the CES Hype, It’s Better to Wait on That 4K TV” is a nytimes.com story by a journalist who was underwhelmed at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas).

Personally I would be interested in a TV operating system that had reasonably good digital picture frame capabilities. I wrote about this in 2010 (Why don’t people use a small TV as a digital picture frame?) and in 2012 (Best LCD television for use as a digital photo display?), but I don’t know of any 2016 model that meets the basic requirements, i.e., can turn itself on automatically at 8 am, go into photo display mode, and, ideally, pull images from a local or cloud-based server (Google Photos for example).

What do readers think? Any exciting TV (or other) news from CES?

[Personally I’m kind of interested in the Thinkpad Yoga with an OLED screen. I’m not sure how this would be better than a Microsoft Surface Book, though. Lenovo’s prices seem a lot better. It is $1400 for an LCD-screen Yoga with 16 GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. That’s a $2700 configuration from Microsoft. Screen size and resolution is about the same. The software is the same Windows 10, right? The Surface Book has a fancier graphics card but I’m not a gamer.]

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Looking for some family-friendly entertainment with the string “disneynature”:

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“Reports of Attacks on Women in Germany Heighten Tension Over Migrants” (NYT, January 5, 2016) describes how women in Germany are subject to attacks based on their sex. Would any German woman therefore now qualify for asylum in the U.S. under the “credible fear” standard that our government puts forth?

If so, would a German woman want to emigrate to the U.S.?

Germany has a higher labor force participation rate (source), an indication either that work is better in Germany or there are fewer ways to collect money without working. Digging further into the data, it looks as though “prime working age women” are substantially more likely to have jobs in Germany than in the U.S. This may be due to the fact that, as one high-income German put it, “it is a lot easier to work your pussy in the U.S. than in Germany.” According to the German lawyer whom we interviewed the international chapter of Real World Divorce, alimony has been difficult to obtain in Germany since 2009. With child support revenue in Germany capped at $6,000 per child per year, having sex with a dermatologist or two does not lead to the spending power of a dermatologist, as it would in Massachusetts or Wisconsin. [Note that, according to a jet-owner at NBAA, some German women already move to the U.S. in order to secure the jurisdiction of a U.S. family court and then collect child support at U.S. rates.]

Germany has a lower GDP-per-capita than the U.S. (CIA), suggesting that a German immigrant could live with more material prosperity here. German-Americans earn more than the U.S. average (Wikipedia), further enhancing the material advantages to a move.

The German K-12 system leads to a superior education (PISA scores) compared to the U.S., which should put a German immigrant, despite the language handicap, at a further advantage to native-born Americans in the workforce.

How about open space? Even before the latest crush of migrants, Germany had a population density of 591 per square mile (Wikipedia), compared to 85 in the U.S.

OECD publishes a “better life index” for Germany and the U.S. with comparisons on some additional axes.

Readers: What do you think? Can a German woman show the Times article and perhaps some YouTube footage to a U.S. official and get asylum? If so, should she take it?

[The OECD page shows that median after-tax household income in Germany is $31,252 per year. That’s $601 per week. The Massachusetts child support guidelines worksheet shows that, without working at all, a female refugee who had sex with any man earning more than $3,315 per week, or $172,380 per year, would have a higher spending power than if she had remained in Germany and worked for wages as part of a median-income household.]

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