Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Todays’ NYT includes “Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All.” To moderate the dollars uber alles message, the article says “some of the things that make people happiest — short commutes, time spent with friends — have little to do with higher incomes.” In a United States that gets more crowded every year (“ask an American Indian what happens when you don’t control immigration” will become more poignant when we cross the 400 million and 500 million resident lines), houses that are close to jobs are going to become ever more expensive. If you work in Manhattan, have a wife and kids, and want a commute shorter than 45 minutes, you’ll need $3 million for a 3BR apartment. Things aren’t much better in California and the other coastal areas where most Americans live.

What about “time with friends”? Imagine that you work in Los Angeles and, because you can afford only $350,000 for a house, have a four-hour daily round-trip commute to an exurban subdivision. How much time will you have available to be with friends? Contrast that to a multimillionaire who lives and works in Santa Monica and can ride a bicycle 15 minutes to work.

“Time with friends” becomes even more of a luxury in a country where people disperse geographically after high school, after college, and after graduate or professional school. Peoples’ closest friends tend to be those made during the ages of 15-30. With domestic airfares getting closer to $1000 round-trip and hotel rooms in big cities between $300 and $400 per night, how often will a middle class American be able to see friends from college?

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All wisdom comes from watching television. Tonight a viewer on a political panel show called in and posed the following question to the assembled pundits: “All three current presidential candidates are senators. All three claim to have tremendous leadership skills and ideas for improving the lives of all Americans. If they have such great ideas and leadership abilities, why haven’t any of them been able to lead their colleagues in the Senate to accomplish anything significant?”

He raises a good point. Obama, Clinton, and McCain are among the 150 or so most powerful Americans. They can literally rewrite all of the laws in this country. Yet it would be tough to find anyone who can say that they have enjoyed greater opportunities or a better life because of something that one of these three has done.

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Today’s New York Times carries a story about the U.S. government financing home construction for Palestinians: “New Home-Buying Plan May Bolster Abbas”. You would think that we have demonstrated conclusively, by our own sagging economy, the dangers of investing almost exclusively in housing as opposed to factories and industry. Now the Palestinians, who have the world’s highest birthrate and a level of education and productivity that is not competitive with Asia, are going to have an even larger imbalance between housing and jobs.

The article does not address the question of why this is being funded by U.S. taxpayers. Wealthy Arab nations are buying up assets all over the U.S. because they can’t figure out what to do with the hundreds of billions of dollars that we’ve been sending them. These same folks often express solidarity with the Palestinians. If folks in the Emirates can afford to buy investment banks in the U.S., airports and container shipping ports throughout the world, and personal Boeing 747s (some of which cost about as much as this program), how come they won’t give their Palestinian brothers a mortgage?

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Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an article on the softening of the yacht market. This is consistent with some friends’ experience in the jet market. A group of pilots at Hanscom Field are trying to buy a Cessna Citation Mustang business jet without waiting the full three years it takes to get one from Cessna. The asking prices seem to have come down at least $100,000 (out of approximately $3 million) over the last two months.

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My lust for the smell of burning kerosene has driven me to spend a lot of time in the suburbs of Cincinnati. All of the stores and restaurants in Cincinnati seem to be staffed by high school students. This probably doesn’t seem unusual to the average American, but it struck me because I couldn’t remember ever seeing a Cambridge Public School student working an after-school or weekend job. Stores and restaurants in Cambridge seem to employ adults, often recent immigrants.

I can’t figure out what would account for the huge observed difference. It can’t be that Cambridge High School students are spending all of their time studying because they consistently score very poorly on achievement tests. Nor do I think that it is a question of household income because the Cambridge High School serves a lot of teenagers whose parents are on welfare, living in city-owned housing, etc. (after the chucking of an honors program, the higher-income parents moved their children to private schools or moved the entire family to Brookline or Newton).

If I go to a supermarket in Cambridge on a weekend, why don’t I see a Cambridge High School kid working the checkout?

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The newspapers are full of stories about politicians frantically searching for a way to prevent foreclosures and dramatic declines in the price of houses across the United States. The thinking seems to be that high house prices are good for the economy. Maybe they are good for the banks and Wall Street firms who lent money on the theory that a crummy 100-year-old wooden house was worth $1 million. It is tough to see how high house prices are good for the economy as a whole and for job growth.

Suppose that I want to employ a woman who supports a family of four in California, Boston, or New York City. I have to pay her enough that she can afford to buy or rent a three-bedroom place to live. If that three-bedroom place costs $1 or $2 million, I will have to pay her quite a lot of money simply so that she can survive. I might find that a worker in Guadalajara, Bangalore, or Shanghai could do the job for less than half the salary and yet live quite comfortably. The next time that I get a big tax break from the Federales, therefore, I invest it in a new office somewhere that has a reasonable cost of housing and therefore a reasonable cost of labor.

We spent most of our investment capital over the last ten years building huge and luxurious houses. Americans were by far the best-housed people in the world before, but now many of us are truly living like kings. Does this help our international competitiveness? Does an employer care that we can go home to a 6,000 square foot McMansion and watch a 60″ TV in our media room? I don’t see why the employer would care. In fact, an employer would probably prefer that his workers be housed in sufficiently squalid conditions that employees were encouraged to linger in the office. Certainly the employer doesn’t want to have to pay a worker extra just so that he or she can afford to pay rent or mortgage in an artificially inflated housing market.

Reporters and pundits are saying that government intervention in the housing market is inevitable. As we hand out tax dollars to ensure that $1 million houses are still priced at $1 million, let’s not forget to hand out some more tax dollars to employers as an incentive for them to keep hiring Americans who need to pay a $70,000 per year mortgage.

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Congress has decided to leave no house price speculator behind: “Homebuilders get breaks from Congress.”

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“Playing the Housing Blame Game” by David Leonhardt is an interesting New York Times story on what happens when you use tax policy to encourage people to spend a lot of money on houses instead of investing it in businesses. It turns out that you end up with a country with spectacularly expensive houses and feeble job growth.

Our government seems so plodding and ineffective most of the time that it is tough to remember how powerful it is.

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The Daily Mail shows some newly discovered photos of German officials enjoying life at the Auschwitz death camp in 1944 and 1945. The album belonged to a senior officer, Karl Hocker, who worked in a bank prior to World War II and returned to his career after the war.

The photos live in a Washington, D.C. museum, which has a crummy Web page devoted to them with some low-res photos.

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Here’s an important video for understanding how tomorrow’s job market is likely to work: small-size WMV format | even smaller YouTube version

If you’re interested in Alaska, brown bears, or hand-to-hand combat, this video should prove useful.

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