The frequency of extreme temperatures (hot and cold) has plummeted in the US over the past century.
All of the dire warnings from climate scientists and climate models have proven wrong, yet the press and the current government ramp up their hysteria as their scam comes to an end on January 20, 2017.
1. The Nightmare. A wild man who offends all our allies and enemies and everyone else and declares war on Kyrgystan to punish it for being too hard to spell.
2. Promise Keeper/Paladin of the Right. Trade barriers up, immigration down, many illegals expelled. Everything the government was doing that offended his base, from restrictions on burning carbon to pressuring colleges to lower their standard for convicting students accused of sexual assault, cancelled or reversed.
3. Virtuous Traitor. All the bad ideas on immigration and trade either retracted, forgotten, or deliberately proposed in versions Congress won't pass. All the good ideas–school vouchers, reduced regulation, legalizing interstate sales of health insurance, replacing Obamacare with something that works, simplifying the tax code–implemented.
4. Hillary+. Lots of ideas the left likes–increased government spending, increased borrowing, free colleges, student loan forgiveness–implemented with the support of most of the Democratic party and parts of the Republican.
All of these are possible. The first is less likely and the last more likely than most commenters, especially on the left, think. The belief that Trump is crazy is based on his performance during the campaign, repeatedly doing things that would obviously result in his losing. Since they resulted in his winning, one has to revise that judgement and consider that perhaps he is crazy like a fox.
The belief that he is a right winger is also based on his performance during the campaign. There too, the fact that it worked suggests that his positions may have been tactical, not ideological. We do not know what ideological beliefs, if any, he actually has. Things he has said in the years before are at least equally consistent with viewing him as center left.
That is half of the argument for the final possible Trump. The other half is George Bush. Bush was elected as a conservative. He proceeded to sharply increase spending, the deficit, and government control over education. Spending money is generally popular, lowering taxes is generally popular, and there are usually political points to be made by "doing something" about whatever people at the moment want something done about.
My guess is that the two least likely outcomes of the election are the first and worst and the third and best.
One of the homilies one hears all the time from economists is "Never reason from a price change." What does this mean? Prices emerge in the market at the intersection of the supply and demand curve. Often, when (say) a price of a commodity like oil decreases, pundits might reason that the demand for oil has suddenly dropped. But they don't necessarily know that, not without information other than just the price change. The price could have dropped because of a shift in the supply curve or the demand curve, or perhaps some combination of both. We can't know just from the price change.
Which gets me thinking about the last election. Trump won the election in part because several states like PA and WI, which had been safe Democratic wins in the last several elections, shifted to voting Republican. Reasoning from this shift, pundits have poured forth today with torrents of bloviation about revolutionary changes in how groups like midwestern white males are voting. But all these pundits were way wrong yesterday, so why would we expect them to suddenly be right today? In my mind they are making the same mistake as reasoning from a price change, because the shift in relative party fortunes in a number of states could be because Trump is somehow doing better than Romney and McCain, or it could be because Clinton is doing worse than Obama. Without other information, it is just as likely the story of the election is about a Clinton loss, not a Trump win.
Republican pundits want to think that they are riding some sort of revolutionary wave in the country. Democratic pundits don't want to admit their candidate was really weak and like how they can spin white supremacist story lines out of the narrative that Trump won on the backs of angry white men.
The only way we can know the true story is to get more data than just the fact of the shift. Let's go to Ramesh Ponnuru (and Kevin Drum from the other side of the political aisle makes many of the same points here and here).
The exit polls are remarkable. Would you believe that Mitt Romney won a greater percentage of the white vote than Donald Trump? Mitt took 59 percent while Trump won 58 percent. Would you believe that Trump improved the GOP’s position with black and Hispanic voters? Obama won 93 percent of the black vote. Hillary won 88 percent. Obama won 71 percent of the Latino vote. Hillary won 65 percent.
Critically, millions of minority voters apparently stayed home. Trump’s total vote is likely to land somewhere between John McCain’s and Romney’s (and well short of George W. Bush’s 2004 total), while the Democrats have lost almost 10 million voters since 2008. And all this happened even as Democrats doubled-down on their own identity politics. Black Lives Matter went from a fringe movement to the Democratic mainstream in the blink of an eye. Radical sexual politics were mainstreamed even faster. White voters responded mainly by voting in the same or lesser numbers as the last three presidential elections. That’s not a “whitelash,” it’s consistency.
As I know all too well, a portion of Trump’s online support is viciously racist. Conservative and liberal Americans can and must exercise extreme vigilance to insure that not one alt-right “thinker” has a place in the Trump administration, but it’s simply wrong to attribute Trump’s win to some form of great white wave. Trump won because minority voters let him win. The numbers don’t lie. The “coalition of the ascendant” stayed home.
Trump had roughly the same vote totals as Romney and McCain, and did relatively better with non-whites and Hispanics. The difference in the election was not any particular enthusiasm for Trump, and certainly not any unique white enthusiasm, but a total lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton. Look at the numbers in Drum's post -- Hillary did worse with every group. For god sakes, she did 5 points worse than Obama with unmarried women, the Lena Dunham crowd that theoretically should have been her core constituency. She did 8 points worse than Obama with Latino women!
This is not a story of a Trump revolution. This is a story of a loss by a really weak Clinton. Obama would have dusted the floor with Trump.
According to Humberto Fontova (Cuban-American author, blogger and political commentator) in his book “The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro,” the daily food rations for slaves in Cuba in 1842 based on royal decree from the Spanish king were significantly more generous than the daily food rations for Cubans in 1962 when the Castro regime first implemented its food rationing system (and the rations haven’t improved much over time).
The world’s most brilliant and famous climatologist, Dr. James Hansen of NASA, predicted Lower Manhattan would be underwater no later than the year 2018. he was still predicting that as late as 2001.
著名风投家 Peter Thiel 向共和党总统候选人特朗普（Donald Trump） 竞选活动捐款125万美元的消息在硅谷引发了阵阵回响，旨在促进科技公司员工多元化的非营利组织“容纳计划”(Project Include)宣布终止与 Peter Thiel 担任顾问的创业孵化器 Y Combinator 的合作。Y Combinator（YC）成立于2005年，孵化了过去十年科技行业一些最知名的公司，其中包括 Airbnb、Dropbox和Stripe。Project Include 的联合创始人鲍康如称，Thiel 的行动与 Project Include 的价值观直接冲突，因为他与YC的关系，她们只能被迫终止与 YC 的关系。YC 的总裁 Sam Altman 则通过Twitter上的一系列帖子力挺Peter Thiel，他指出切割反对观点只会导致极端主义，不会创造一个我们想要的国家。观点的多元化对于一个民主社会的健康是痛苦但至关重要的，我们不能因为一个人的政治支持而清除掉他们。鲍康如否定Peter Thiel的捐款能被视为政治言论的说法，她说，我们一致同意不能因为一个人的政治观点而解雇他们，但这件事不是对纳税政策的异议，而是鼓吹仇恨和暴力。她指出特朗普对黑人、墨西哥人、亚裔、穆斯林、犹太人和女性的攻击不是政治言论，而是点燃了仇恨和鼓励暴力，让每个人都感觉不到安全。
DIY Detroit, by Kimberley Kinder, University of Minnesota Press, 248 pages, $24.95
In 1950, roughly 1.9 million people lived in Detroit. Fewer than 700,000 are left there today. In the bankrupt, crime-ridden city, the government has largely lost the ability to provide the services it once promised. And so residents have taken to plowing streets, picking up trash, and maintaining public facilities on their own.
"When public schools performed poorly, parents looked to homeschooling alternatives," Kimberley Kinder writes in DIY Detroit. "When public libraries closed, residents set up mobile book shares. When ambulances were unreliable, neighbors organized dial-a-ride phone trees to get people to hospitals." And when streetlights failed, a computer programmer named Ellison tells Kinder, people started to "leave their porch lights on all night."
DIY Detroit is filled with these simultaneously inspiring and heartbreaking tales of perseverance and innovation. Unfortunately, to learn about these residents' struggles to keep their community habitable, you have to dig your way through layers of Kinder's tendentious take on why Detroit declined. But the effort is worthwhile. Kinder, an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, documents dozens of examples of "self-provisioning"—that is, of Detroiters doing for themselves in a city from which much of the population has fled. "You have to take matters into your own hands," Elena, a young mother, tells Kinder. "'Cause if not, if you wait, then you wait, and wait, and wait. You're going to end up frustrated, and it's probably not going to get done."
How Detroit residents take matters into their own hands depends on their time, resources, and willingness to commit themselves. Those efforts range from disguising vacant homes to demolishing abandoned structures, from creating unofficial parks to standing in for a shrinking police department.
In a city where one in four housing units was empty by 2010 and much of the area is being claimed by an "urban prairie" of returning plants and wildlife, matching potential residents with abandoned but still-livable homes has become an important activity. Empty houses are ripe for picking by "scrappers" who strip anything of value and leave the gutted shell uninhabitable. The best defense is for residents to actively seek new neighbors who will maintain the homes and protect the community from further decline. "Among these recruits," Kinder tells us, "some became official owners or renters, and others lived informally as squatters."
When people are wary of new neighbors who move illegally into abandoned homes, squatters demonstrate their worthiness with public displays of responsibility, such as trimming bushes and openly making repairs.
About half of the 73 residents Kinder interviewed described acting as volunteer realtors. But with so many homes empty, it's impossible to match every dwelling with an inhabitant. That's when remaining residents make efforts to camouflage abandoned structures or render them inaccessible to scrappers and drug dealers. "Residents used disguises, caretaking, booby traps, and sabotage to self-provision a public order the underfunded police department could not provide," Kinder explains. Their efforts might be as simple as keeping the lawns mowed, or they could become more elaborate exercises in illusion, such as putting up seasonal decorations. In worst-case scenarios, residents demolished abandoned structures that had become problems—sometimes legally, sometimes not. "The headaches and expenses of by-the-book demolition," Kinder writes, "encouraged residents to find informal alternatives."
Those informal alternatives enjoy some degree of nudge-and-wink approval from the authorities. Kinder interviews one activist who demolished 113 houses without repercussions. Another Detroit resident described a police operator's response to her phone complaint about a drug house. "Are you sure you've got the right number?" she was asked. "Are you sure you don't want the number for the Fire Department instead?" She took that as a hint that arson might be the way to go.
But it's not just homes that have been abandoned—so have public works. Residents have reclaimed trash-strewn city-owned lots as parks and gardens. Farming is technically illegal in Detroit, but raising vegetables in a city partially returning to nature makes sense both to countercultural new arrivals and to low-income longtime residents alike.
In a place that, as of the FBI's most recent statistics, has the -highest violent crime rate among cities its size in the country, safety is also an obvious concern. Detroit's police department shrank from about 4,000 officers in 2000 to roughly 2,400 in 2013, prompting the police union to issue an (admittedly self-serving) warning to the public that the city was too dangerous to visit. Scattered across the increasingly depopulated urban prairie, city residents have responded with everything from formal police-affiliated civilian patrols to ad hoc street-watching through open windows. One elderly woman, Edna, told Kinder that "it was like a gentleman's agreement that nobody parked on the streets" so that residents could have clear sight lines to keep an eye out for people up to no good.
In many ways Detroit dwellers have rediscovered the value of the old-style nosy neighbors who watch out for each other and perform the ubiquitous surveillance that modern law-enforcement agencies can only hope to replicate with cameras and algorithms. One side of this that Kinder ignores is Detroit Police Chief James Craig's high-profile cheerleading for armed citizens self-provisioning for self-defense and deterrence. "The police cannot be everywhere. This is about personal protection," he told CNN in 2014.
Early on, Kinder cautions us that it's "unfair to expect fragmented self-provisioning to reverse Detroit's trenchant history of disinvestment, racism, and crisis." And indeed, the efforts of the residents she interviews seem puny against the sheer magnitude of the collapse of a major city and the exodus of much of its population and economic base. But these residents' perseverance is the bright spot in this book. It certainly has to be at the core of any effort to salvage a viable community from the wreckage of Detroit.
But what about that -wreckage? What turned once vibrant Motor City into a post-apocalyptic wasteland without an actual apocalypse you can blame?
Again and again, Kinder insists that Detroit is a paradigm of the "neoliberal city," tagging that unfortunate place with a term—neoliberal—that has infested social science. Early on, she writes that her book "explains the effect urban disinvestment and neoliberal policy agendas have on self-provisioning practices." In her conclusion, she tells us that Detroit residents' do-it-yourself work "underscores the need for meaningful, organized, collective responses against neoliberal capitalism and market-based governing." Neoliberalism, she says, involves "market-based policies that emphasize individual, profit-based solutions to collective needs and oppose wealth distribution for social programs."
At least she defined it. The meaning of "neoliberal" is so shifting and obscure that it has prompted a cottage industry of efforts to critique its usage. Rajesh Venugopal, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, wrote last year that the word holds little clear meaning beyond an expression of disdain for all things vaguely market-oriented, arguing that it "serves as a rhetorical tool and moral device for critical social scientists outside of economics to conceive of academic economics and a range of economic phenomena that are otherwise beyond their cognitive horizons and which they cannot otherwise grasp or evaluate."
In this case, Venugopal's critique is on the money. For Kinder, "-neoliberalism" means Detroit was abandoned by investors and prosperous white residents eager to settle in the suburbs and avoid sharing the burden for city services; the local government, meanwhile, surrendered to raw market forces. Is that how it happened?
Some of that's true—white flight certainly was real—but the idea of Detroit as some sort of market-driven dystopia is absurd. "Regulations for food trucks are byzantine, with multiple layers of approvals needed," Michigan Capitol Confidential noted in 2013. "Detroit's archaic ordinances...don't make sense for a city looking to stimulate small-business activity," complained Crain's Detroit Business in 2011. As the sharing economy reached Motor City and brought jobs and convenience with it, Detroit officials repeatedly threatened Uber and Lyft with intrusive and potentially crippling regulations. But if the city discourages entrepreneurial employment, it does its best to pad government payrolls funded by the private sector. Workers were laid off from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department in 2015 only after years of outside complaints about bloated payrolls and inflated costs—in a municipal government that taxpayers can already barely afford.
Lew Mandell, an economist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, recently recounted to PBS' Newshour how in 1972, when he was with the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, the city commissioned him to examine its then-growing uneasiness at being so entirely dependent on the auto industry. He confirmed the city's concerns and cautioned that other businesses were leaving Detroit (and Michigan) because of "unpopular government policies [that] included relatively high business taxes and what employers perceived as 'unbalanced' worker's compensation laws. There was an overall feeling that government was hostile toward business." In the course of his research, he discovered that officials had received the same warnings from economists 11 years earlier—and even before that in the late 1940s. "Study after study delivered the same results," he said, "which were largely ignored."
Auto-driven prosperity kept Detroit afloat for a few decades. But those concerns caught up with the city as the rules continued to tighten, turning the trickle of non-car businesses leaving the city into a flood—and as the local automobile industry itself lost energy in the 1970s and began its own diaspora.
The people Kinder interviewed don't seem to find her arguments persuasive, either. She writes that "almost none of the residents I spoke with described these activities in countercultural terms. Instead they tried to reinforce—not undermine—the capitalist status quo." Kinder's book would have been that much stronger if she had let Detroiters' efforts to survive in a failing city speak for themselves, without trying to shoehorn them into the story she wished they told.
"We realised nobody had directly compared Neanderthal [teeth loss] to modern humans, so we didn't realise Neanderthals had [slightly less] tooth loss," says Weaver.
This flies in the face of previous studies, which suggested that several Neanderthals lived long after losing all, or nearly all, their teeth.
But bizarrely, the finding that Neanderthals apparently had healthy teeth actually suggests something rather negative about them.
I don’t disagree that there is a slight difference in tooth loss. That does not contradict the real observation that some Neandertal individuals had extensive premortem tooth loss.
Mandible of the Neandertal with the most premortem tooth loss, La Chapelle-aux-Saints. Photo by Milford Wolpoff.
I agree that some people have made more cultural conclusions from the observation of tooth loss than the data warrant. I wrote about this back in 2005, when the subject of discussion was total premortem tooth loss in the Dmanisi skull D3444: “Caring for the edentulous”. My conclusions today don’t differ from then:
In the case of life history variation, I think that the survival of a small number of individuals under extraordinary circumstances says little about the habitual capabilities of a species.
A handful of Neandertals lived with fairly extensive loss of dental function, but that probably doesn’t tell us much about Neandertals that we do not already know about many primates.
What I really object to in the linked article is the way this topic is framed: This good thing about Neandertals “bizarrely suggests something negative about them.”
Often in human evolution, research is presented with a simple storyline that goes like this: “This bad thing everybody knows about, well, guess what—it’s actually good when you think about it from the evolutionary perspective.”
That’s the storyline of the sickle cell mutation. It causes disease, but it is an adaptation to malaria. It’s also the storyline of the “thrifty genotype” idea: Diabetes is bad, but its occurrence today may be a side effect of ancient adaptations to food scarcity.
That framing doesn’t erase the bad aspects of such biological traits, but it does give people a different way of thinking about why bad things happen. “Everything bad is actually good” is a fairly useful frame for teaching human evolution.
The opposite storyline is also pretty common. “That good thing that everybody knows about? Well, guess what—it’s actually bad when you think about it from the evolutionary perspective.”
This is how the invention of agriculture gets portrayed nowadays. Jared Diamond famously called it, “The worst mistake in the history of the human race.” The idea is that once upon a time, humans were adapted to a hunter-gatherer existence, and agricultural subsistence caused scores of bad unforeseen effects.
This “everything good is actually bad” storyline is especially common when it comes to studying Neandertals. For example, Neandertals seem to have eaten lots of meat. Does that mean they were successful hunters optimizing resources in a harsh environment? No, it means they failed to build knowledge of plant foods, putting them at extreme risk of extinction when times got tough.
Another example: Some Neandertal sites seem to have different assemblages of tools that may be suited to different functional tasks, for example some toolkits include many scrapers for preparing hides, while others lack such a dominance of scrapers. Is this evidence of clever and flexible Neandertals? No, to some archaeologists it was evidence that Neandertals must have behaved like herd animals, with women and children in some camps, and small groups of bachelor males in others.
Every so often, new evidence convincingly debunks one of these Neandertal stereotypes. For example, over the past ten years, a series of papers describing starches and phytoliths in Neandertal dental calculus have documented their use of plant resources, including cooking of some grains and the possible use of medicinal plants. In this case and many others, the press has reported the “surprising” conclusion that Neandertals were very much like modern human subsistence foragers.
Just once, I would like to see a journalist report such results as unsurprising evidence that past archaeologists were incompetent.
Now I don’t want to go overboard in the opposite direction. There probably really were some strange things about some Neandertals. Culture did evolve, and the evolutionary history of Neandertals probably yielded cultural abilities that humans lack, just as modern humans may have abilities that they lacked. In other words, I do not assume that they were merely modern humans with browridges.
But these are among the hardest ideas to test with archaeological evidence. At the same time, ideas about Neandertal cognitive difference align with persistent stereotypes about Neandertals. For that reason, I maintain an attitude of skepticism.
We know a good amount. Some of the cultural behaviors of recent and living modern humans have never been noted in Neandertal sites. But their tools, the traces of animals and plants that they ate, and their use of space show that Neandertal subsistence behavior had a lot in common with modern human subsistence foragers.
Many modern human subsistence foraging groups have left little or no evidence of “symbolic” artifacts, “complex site structure”, musical instruments, projectile weapons or similar trappings. We now know that Neandertals used pigments, engraved objects and rock surfaces, wore ornaments, made and used many kinds of bone tools, used shellfish, birds and small mammals—basically all things that past stereotypes held they didn’t do.
The point is, the difference between Neandertal and modern human behavior is clearly not a yawning chasm. They overlapped.
Studying Neandertal biological traits in combination with archaeology has a lot to offer to understanding their behavior. Dental pathology is a great avenue to understand how their health relates to their subsistence behavior. For example, Neandertals were once believed to have a much higher incidence of developmental dental pathologies than modern humans, traits like linear enamel hypoplasias that result from stress on the developing teeth from nutritional shortfalls or disease. It turns out that many modern human groups have just as high an incidence of such dental traits as Neandertals, including children from many agricultural groups.
Both Neandertals and prehistoric modern human subsistence foragers have vastly lower incidence of dental pathologies like caries when compared to most agricultural peoples, so it’s interesting to see that tooth loss was actually less among Neandertals than in the prehistoric modern human groups.
Better teeth may reflect the basic fact that Neandertals died faster than the Upper Paleolithic modern humans that followed them. By our best estimates (provided by Rachel Caspari and Sang-Hee Lee), Neandertal mortality was greater across the adult life span. Most known Neandertal dental remains come from relatively young adults, less than thirty or so years old.
Such high mortality probably does indicate something about Neandertal social relationships. Today’s human cultures owe much to the knowledge and experience of older adults, common in human societies. If those older adults were rarer, with some groups lacking older adults altogether, Neandertal cultures must have been poorer for it.
But adults in their twenties and thirties are not poor caregivers today. In fact, they are the primary caregivers toward both children and the most aged adults in our societies.
For that reason, I resist the framing that Neandertals good teeth may have meant they took less care of the sick. It may well have been true that sick Neandertals did not live as long, or have as good a chance of recovery. But I attribute that to the basic challenges of subsistence, not social incompetence.
References
Caspari, R., & Lee, S. H. (2004). Older age becomes common late in human evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 101(30), 10895-10900. doi:10.1073/pnas.0402857101
Speth, J. (2004). News flash: negative evidence convicts Neanderthals of gross mental incompetence. World archaeology, 36(4), 519-526. doi:10.1080/0043824042000303692
Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton added an important detail to her family agenda this week, outlining a plan to double the child tax credit for families with children four and under from $1,000 to $2,000. This new offering comes on the heels of an earlier campaign rollout of a plan to make child care more affordable by capping families’ expenditures on child care at 10 percent of their income, with no commitment to extending similar support to families with a stay-at-home parent. Clinton’s latest family-policy proposal extends a helping hand to nearly all families with young children bearing the financial burden of raising the next generation. In contrast, her child-care plan leaves a substantial share of American families and children out in the cold. Indeed, her plan to spend billions subsidizing child care for dual-earner families, but not for families with one parent at home, raises important questions about the division of paid and unpaid work in American families today:
What share of families with children have a stay-at-home parent? And what share of children have a stay-at-home parent? More generally, how do contemporary parents divide paid and unpaid work?
How do today’s parents wish to handle paid work? And what kind of care do they think is ideal for their children?
In looking at both the real-world strategies and ideals of contemporary parents, it becomes apparent that no one model of handling work-family responsibilities describes the majority of American families. In fact, a large minority of families have a parent at home. What’s more, a majority of American parents believe having an at-home parent is ideal for kids.
MORE THAN A THIRD OF FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN FOUR AND UNDER HAVE A STAY-AT-HOME PARENT
As the figure below indicates, 36 percent of families with children four and under have a parent who is at home or not working. Among two-parent families, 32 percent of families with young children have at least one parent at home. Four percent of families with children four and under are headed by a single parent at home. These families would not benefit from a family policy that is focused only on paid child care.
Figure One also indicates that no one model of dividing paid work describes the majority of America’s families with younger children. The biggest group — where both parents work full-time — only accounts for 37 percent of American families with children four and under. Even focusing on two-parent families alone, only 44 percent of these families have parents who both work 35 hours or more per week.
The composition of American families changes a bit when we look at all families — that is families with children 18 and under. But as Figure Two indicates, the basic story remains much the same. Twenty-nine percent of families with children 18 and under have a stay-at-home parent, typically the mother. And, here again, the largest plurality is families with parents who work full time (at 38 percent).
37 PERCENT OF CHILDREN FOUR AND UNDER HAVE A STAY-AT-HOME PARENT
The picture changes a bit when we focus on the share of children four and under by family type. Because families with a stay-at-home parent tend to be larger, more children are in such families than is indicated by looking at patterns by family, as in Figure One. Indeed, Figure Three indicates that 38 percent of children four and under live with a stay-at-home parent. Moreover, four in ten young children living in two-parent homes have a stay-at-home parent. And only 36 percent of children four and under live in a family where both parents work 35 hours a week or more outside the home. In general, then, as policymakers are considering work-family policies, they should bear in mind not only the composition of families but also the composition of children’s families.
NO ONE BEST WAY
When we turn to examining the ideal work-family arrangement for parents, no one best way emerges as the option chosen by a majority of mothers. The most popular choice for mothers is to work part-time, with 49 percent selecting this option, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll (see below). Still, what is striking about the poll is that no single approach captures the hearts and minds of a majority of American mothers. On the other hand, a slim majority of fathers — 52 percent — prefer full-time work. But as the figure below indicates, even here we see considerable diversity in fathers’ preferences when it comes to paid work. In general, then, there is no clear consensus about work preferences among the majority of today’s parents.
When it comes to directly considering the care of children, parents’ ideals about stay-at-home parenthood are somewhat different than their ideals about work. That is, both mothers and fathers are more likely to say that having one parent at home is ideal for children, even if that is not the majority preference for fathers or mothers themselves. Among parents with children younger than 18, 56 percent of mothers and 69 percent of fathers say it is better for children to have a parent at home, according to a 2014 Pew Research survey.
Taken together, these findings suggest a measure of ambivalence about juggling paid work, parenting, and family life among many American parents, with the ideal work schedule diverging somewhat from the ideal parenting schedule. As the survey data indicate, parents often value flexible work options and arrangements as they raise children, including the option of having one parent at home full-time for some or all of their children’s lives.
In crafting family policies, including those involving the care of children, policymakers should not lose sight of three social facts: 1) A large minority of families and young children are cared for by at-home parents, 2) Most parents think having a stay-at-home parent is ideal for children, and 3) Most fundamentally, no one model for dividing work and family responsibilities captures the contemporary reality of American family life.
Policymakers should keep this diversity in mind as they put forward tax and child-care policies intended to help all families juggle the demands of work and family life. Most importantly, they should avoid advancing family policies that leave one-third of families with young children out of the picture.
That's a stark contrast from 2014, when the value of a medallion was listed around $1.3 million.
Medallions are tightly regulated, and you cannot operate a taxi in New York without one. They're losing value with the cab business taking a hit amid the rise of rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft.
Notably, although taxis are still beating Uber and Lyft in New York City, the share of trips shrank to 65% in April 2016 from 84% in April 2015, according to charts shared by Morgan Stanley analysts in July.
Moreover, the team also shared a graph showing the total dispatched trips per day in New York in April 2016 compared to April 2015.
Again, although the number of trips per day for NYC taxis is far greater than the number of trips per day by Uber and/or Lyft, the figure for cabs has dropped by about 9%, while the rate for Uber and Lyft has surged.
Since yesterday’s post actually took about a week to write, today I’m just posting some of the data/graphs I ran across in the process but didn’t utilize.
Since anyone can make a graph and claim to have used X source, and even honest people sometimes make mistakes, I try to double-check graphs before I use them. I never did manage to double-check this one, so it didn’t get used. If anyone can vouch for or against it, I’d be grateful.
edited to remove poster’s name
Oh, and just in case anyone wants it, here is the data I used to construct the graphs on lynching/lynching rates:
ROLI CEO Roland Lamb was walking home from his office in East London three years ago when his phone rang. "Hans Zimmer just called the office line and he was asking for you," said one of his employees who was still in the office.
Zimmer is the respected German composer who has scored over 150 movies including "The Lion King," "Gladiator," and "Inception."
A few minutes later, Lamb's phone rang again. "Hi, this is Hans Zimmer," the voice said. "I heard about your Seaboard, I’m in London, I want to see it."
The Seaboard is ROLI's only product. It's a futuristic version of the piano that lets you press down parts of the keys to change how they sound. The surface isn't hard like a keyboard, it's made of a springy, foam-like material that can be touched or pressed to make different noises. It's curved, too, so you can run your fingers over it.
Business Insider met with Lamb at ROLI's office in East London, where he talked about his product, as well as his aspirations for it. He doesn't see the Seaboard as a new type of piano, instead, he describes it as "a bona fide new musical instrument."
Lamb is sitting in a small, sound-proof room in the middle of ROLI's office space. It's filled with Seaboards of various sizes, as well as musician Marco Parisi who demonstrated the product to us. Lamb describes meeting Parisi as "one of the most important landmarks for me in the history of this whole project."
Business Insider points out that most people think of a startup as building a software product like an app or website, not a hardware manufacturer that builds musical instruments. Lamb, however, sees ROLI "as an experiences company. We’re trying to deliver new experiences to people."
That's rather different from your run of the mill software startup (although ROLI has acquired two software companies along the way.) "We see ourselves in parallel to other companies that are creating new kinds of connected devices," Lamb says. "Whether it’s wearables or connected home or connected music."
Ask Lamb a question and he'll often sit back, pause, and carefully plan what he's about to say. There's no room for off the cuff answers. Lamb moved to Japan after leaving high school to study Zen Buddhism, and went on to study Classical Chinese and Sanskrit Philosophy at Harvard University.
Lamb says he came up for the idea for the Seaboard while sitting at a piano at the Royal College of Art in London and "thinking about music and design." He closed his eyes, he said, and played a handful of notes. It didn't quite make the sound he wanted, though. Instead of playing three notes together, he wanted to be able to press the key once and change the note instead.
ROLI has gone on to attract attention from some big names in the music industry. Lamb says that when he started the business he created a list of famous people who he wanted to get Seaboards in front of. He says that "eight out of 10" of them now have the device.
One person who Lamb was initially unsuccessful in reaching was musician Stevie Wonder. He tried to get in touch with him to give him a Seaboard but wasn't able to. However, years later, people representing Wonder actually contacted ROLI inquiring about the Seaboard.
ROLI announced in May that it had raised $27 million (£20.7 million) in a funding round led by Foundry Group, with participation from BGF Ventures, and Founders Fund, as well as existing investors Balderton Capital, Index Ventures, and Universal Music Group.
What's it like raising money from Universal Music Group? Surprisingly, Lamb says it's not too different from normal tech venture capital funds. "In the big picture it’s quite similar," he said. "Maybe slightly different points of emphasis so their domain knowledge about some aspects of investments might not be quite as strong as leading global VC firms but it’s not far off."
Lamb says that ROLI will continue to develop its keyboard product, but hints that it has explored alternative ideas for new musical instruments. "We’re ... totally open to considering other form factors and other applications of the technology a little bit down the road," he says. "There’s all kinds of exciting ideas that have been germinating."
Right now those ideas continue to come from ROLI's London office. It's a busy place, with musicians and developers wandering around. Sky News visited the day before to livestream Parisi playing a Seaboard, and Lamb has to dash off to another interview. Days after we visit, the office hosts a group performance with lots of customers playing their Seaboards together.
Many of ROLI's famous customers are based in Los Angeles. Would it be easier for ROLI to move its team to the US? Well, no, Lamb is committed to staying in London: "The reason was that I fell in love with a woman and she was in London and I had to be near her so I moved over here. Fortunately, she’s now my wife so Britain is not just great for business, it’s also great for love."
I am exhausted with folks, particularly on the Progressive Left, judging themselves and each other based on their intentions. Your intentions mean virtually nothing. I suppose it is better to have good intentions than bad, but beyond that results, particularly in the public policy arena, are what should matter. And the results of most Progressive well-intentioned legislation are generally terrible. For example, as I wrote earlier today, poverty in this country is mainly caused by lack of work rather than low wage hours, but Progressives preen over their good intentions in introducing higher and higher minimum wages that will only serve to reduce the work hours of low-skilled poor people.
Via Mark Perry comes this great article on Progressive good intentions in Seattle collapsing into rubble. It does not except well, so I recommend you check it out, but I will summarize it.
Begin with a libertarian goal that should be agreeable to most Progressives -- people should be able to live the way they wish. Add a classic Progressive goal -- we need more low income housing. Throw in a favored Progressive lifestyle -- we want to live in high density urban settings without owning a car.
From this is born the great idea of micro-housing, or one room apartments averaging less than 150 square feet. For young folks, they are nicer versions of the dorms they just left at college, with their own bathroom and kitchenette.
Ahh, but then throw in a number of other concerns of the Progressive Left, as administered by a city government in Seattle dominated by the Progressive Left. We don't want these poor people exploited! So we need to set minimum standards for the size and amenities of apartments. We need to make sure they are safe! So they must go through extensive design reviews. We need to respect the community! So existing residents are given the ability to comment or even veto projects. We can't trust these evil corporations building these things on their own! So all new construction is subject to planning and zoning. But we still need to keep rents low! So maximum rents are set at a number below what can be obtained, particularly given all these other new rules.
As a result, new micro-housing development has come to a halt. A Progressive lifestyle achieving Progressive goals is killed by Progressive regulatory concerns and fears of exploitation. How about those good intentions, where did they get you?
The moral of this story comes back to the very first item I listed, that people should be able to live the way they wish. Progressives feel like they believe this, but in practice they don't. They don't trust individuals to make decisions for themselves, because their core philosophy is dominated by the concept of exploitation of the powerless by the powerful, which in a free society means that they view individuals as idiotic, weak-willed suckers who are easily led to their own doom by the first clever corporation that comes along.
Postscript: Here is a general lesson for on housing affordability: If you give existing homeowners and residents the right (through the political process, through zoning, through community standards) to control how other people use their property, they are always, always, always going to oppose those other people doing anything new with that property. If you destroy property rights in favor of some sort of quasi-communal ownership, as is in the case in San Francisco, you don't get some beautiful utopia -- you get stasis. You don't get progressive experimentation, you get absolute conservatism (little c). You get the world frozen in stone, except for prices that continue to rise as no new housing is built. Which interestingly, is a theme of one of my first posts over a decade ago when I wrote that Progressives Don't Like Capitalism Because They Are Too Conservative.
Postscript #2: So, following the logic above, one can think of building restrictions and zoning as a form of cronyism. Classic cronyism is providing subsidies to politically favored companies and restricting the ability of new competitors to arise to compete with them, granting them an effective monopoly and the ability to jack up their prices. So what do we do with housing? We give massive subsidies to home-owners and restrict competition from new housing that might reduce their home value, thus granting current homeowners an effective monopoly and the ability to jack up their prices. I challenge anyone to tell me that rising home prices in Palo Alto are not driven by the exact same government actions for favored constituents as are rising prices for Epipens.
Postscript #3: I will ask a question using Progressive terminology -- you were worried about these young renters and their power imbalance vs. development companies and landlords. So how much more powerful are they now with a thousand fewer rental units on the market? Consumers have power when supply is plentiful. Anything done to reduce supply is going to reduce consumer power.
Can the Bank of England Really Take Credit for the Post-Brexit Boom?
In the months leading up to June’s Brexit referendum, the British public found themselves bludgeoned by a series of increasingly dire warnings concerning the consequences of a vote to leave the European Union. The campaign of scaremongering, quite self-consciously engaged in by supporters of the EU, ran the gamut from concerns that the UK might be excluded from the Eurovision Song Contest, to warnings by then Prime Minister David Cameron that Brexit could trigger the start of World War Three. Far more commonplace, however, was a seemingly ceaseless procession of warnings that a vote to leave the European Union would cause a recession in the British economy.
During the spring and early summer of this year, scarcely a week went by during which some establishment figure or organisation - from British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, to the IMF, to George Soros — did not make headlines in the UK with their grim predictions for the recession which would surely result from a decision to leave the EU. Indeed, Mr Osborne went so far as to publish a draft of the "emergency budget" which he anticipated would be required in the aftermath of a Brexit, an outcome which he prophesied would result in half a million British job losses. He further threatened that he’d have to make up for a £30 billion budgetary “black hole” by cutting spending on the National Health Service, the state healthcare monopoly which Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, famously described as “the closest thing the English have to a religion.” The British press were particularly keen in their attention to the the warnings of Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, who repeatedly made it known that he foresaw significant negative impacts on the employment and growth rates resulting from a possible Brexit.
In the months since the vote to leave the European Union however, new economic data has tended more and more to undermine the credibility of the predictions of Mr Carney and his peers. It is certainly true that the British economy experienced some initial turbulence, caused by the uncertainty following the unprecedented referendum result, and the immediate resignation of David Cameron as Prime Minister after six years in office. In the months since this initial wobble however, not only has the UK failed to fall into recession, but many key indicators show a remarkable degree of strength in the British economy since the decision to leave the European Union.
The FTSE 100 — the key British economic index, which charts the top 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange — rebounded to pre-Brexit levels by the very next Monday after the vote, and the FTSE 250 achieved the same by the end of July. The Purchasing Managers’ Index, another key indicator of British business health, recorded a record rise in August, the same month during which 3.3 percent more new cars were registered in Britain than in the same month of the previous year. A poll by Markit showed that services, which form the largest sector of the British economy by far, have experienced their biggest surge in the past 20 years, since the vote to leave the European Union. Exports, housing, and construction all remained far stronger than expected in the aftermath of Brexit, and Lloyds, one of Britain’s largest retail and commercial banks, indicated in their July spending power report that they were “more confident of their finances than at any time since the survey began.”
Banks Retract Predictions of Disaster
Two-and-a-half months distant from the referendum result as we now are, the list of individuals and institutions which have had retract their pre-Brexit warnings of a recession, is now growing by the day. Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan have all had to retract their earlier claims that Brexit would cause a recession, as have such influential figures as the Financial Times’ economics editor. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne had the good taste to resign from the government in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and new Chancellor Philip Hammond has been explicit in his assertions that his predecessor’s planned “emergency budget” will not need to be instituted in the aftermath of the vote. Even The Guardian, most vociferous mouthpiece of the metropolitan pro-EU left, was forced to admit that “economists have revised their pessimistic forecasts for the rest of the year and 2017 following a run of figures showing only a modest dip and steady rise in activity”.
This surge of good news in the economy might have been hoped to instil a sense of humility in those who were doomsaying in the run-up to the referendum. Lamentably however, the ‘Project Fear’ which preceded the referendum, and promptly morphed into Project “We Told You So” during the initial post-Brexit uncertainty, seems now to have transformed yet again into Project “Take The Credit,” with Bank of England Governor Mark Carney shamelessly leading the charge in this regard.
Taking Credit for Good News
In order to save face, many of the commentators who predicted dire fallout from Brexit, have now retreated into the contention that it was only the Bank of England’s radical response which saved the British economy from collapse, and their own predictions from being vindicated. As has been more fully elaborated in previous Mises Wire articles, the BoE responded to the referendum result by forcing interest rates down to historic lows, and promising £70 billion of fresh quantitative easing. This new policy of money printing, as has been repeated ad nauseam across the British media establishment, supposedly helped to instil a vague sense of confidence in markets, boosted property prices, and will encourage exports. While it’s true that exports have risen since Brexit, it’s far from a foregone conclusion that this makes the Bank’s devaluation of sterling an unqualified positive, particularly as the imports Britain relies on so heavily have consequently risen in price. Furthermore, a deflation of Britain’s out of control housing bubble might have been a welcome consequence of Brexit. But instead, the Bank of England’s new injections of easy money will continue to inflate the dangerous housing and government debt bubbles currently afflicting the British economy, and will only worsen the eventual crash.
Mr Carney, however, seemed unbothered by such concerns when questioned by MPs on the Treasury Select Committee early this month. Indeed, he declared himself to be “serene” that his own policies had been “validated”, and that the Bank, under his governorship, had been able to “make a success of Brexit.” To steal the defining quote from one of the most notorious and sordid British political scandals of the previous century, “he would say that, wouldn’t he?”
George Pickering is a student of economic history at the London School of Economics.
Well, a new study by researchers at the University of California-Irvine may have figured it out. "Our fears of leaving children alone have become systematically exaggerated in recent decades—not because the practice has become more dangerous, but because it has become socially unacceptable," as the university put it in a news release.
In other words, the only socially acceptable mom has become a mom who never takes her eyes off her kids. With that in mind, whenever we see an unsupervised child, we automatically assume the child has a bad mom. And once we are harshly judging that mom, our minds unconsciously judge her "crime" extra harshly, too. We believe it to be more dangerous than it actually is. So it's a feedback loop: unsupervised kids have terrible moms, terrible moms endanger their kids.
Remember that viral video of a man shrieking at a mother who let her child wait in the car a few minutes while she went into a phone store—a store with a plate glass window through which she could keep an eye on her kid? The videotaper was screaming as if the mom had thrown her child down a well. Many of the comments were just as vicious—"Shame on that horrible mother" was a mild one—even though the child was demonstrably fine.
But our perceptions have nothing to do with the world actually becoming more dangerous (crime is at a 50-year low), or even the legitimate fear of children getting overheated in a car (moms get yelled at for leaving their children for the few seconds it takes to return a grocery cart). Instead, our perceptions have everything to do with our seriously screwed up "moral intuition."
To test that notion, UC-Irvine researchers Ashley J. Thomas, P. Kyle Stanford, and Barbara Sarnecka asked 1200 people to rate how much danger kids were in on a scale of one to ten, in different situations. The only thing the researchers varied was the reason the kids were left unsupervised.
In one survey question, for instance, they presented the story of a child waiting 30 minutes in a car because her mom had been dropping off a book at the library but was hit by a car and temporarily knocked unconscious.
Other groups of survey takers were told the child was left in the car the same amount of time, but the reason for mom's absence was different: She was working, or volunteering, or relaxing, or off to see her lover.
While all five groups of respondents felt the child was in danger, the group that judged the danger the lowest was the group told that the mom was unconscious—in other words, that the mom did not intend to leave her child unattended, it was an accident.
The groups told that the mom was doing anything else—working, volunteering, relaxing—felt the child was in more danger, and the group told that the mom was having an affair felt the child was in the most danger.
So the perceived danger quotient went up when the respondents felt more judgmental toward the mom.
"People felt it was more immoral to leave a child voluntarily than involuntarily," Prof. Sarnecka, a developmental psychologist, told me in a phone interview (after thanking me for Free-Range Kids, the site that "made our research possible"). "And once you think only a bad mom would leave her kid in that situation, then your belief about how dangerous it is goes up."
When the researchers substituted dads for moms in these scenarios, the dads' work-related absences were treated the same as their unintentional absences: Their kids were perceived at the very lowest level of danger. But when women left their kids to do some work, the perceived danger increased.
Unconsciously we seem to consider moms as selfishly, immorally choosing to endanger their kids by going to work. Working mom = evil mom.
The dad test sample was small. The researchers intend to delve into it deeper the next time around. But even the results of the mom-only surveys seem to show that Americans believe the only decent way to raise a child is with a full-time mother never taking her eyes off her kids. Only June Cleaver types get a pass.
Anyone else—impoverished moms, single moms, moms with big families—are seen as putting their kids in danger simply because they cannot directly supervise every kid every second.
Since many moms do work, and since all moms make daily choices as to when to let the kids wait at home, or in the car, or get themselves home from soccer, this exaggerated idea of child endangerment has very real world consequences. Cops seeing kids at the park think the mom is negligent. Child Protective Services represenatives over-estimate the danger to latchkey kids. The result is arrested parents, and arrested development of the kids.
"People are very attached to the idea that they are rational beings," says Sarnecka. But as the study shows, they aren't. They are swayed by unconscious judgments. "It would be really great if people could be rational about their irrationality."
Until that happens, we cannot have open-ended laws that defer to an authority's spidey sense. Instead, we must insist that a child be in provable danger of immediate, indisputable, statistically likely and egregious harm before parents be judged negligent.
Because otherwise they'll just be judged, period—especially the moms, and especially the moms with fewer resources. And that harsh judgment will suffice for a verdict of guilty.
At NBC’s “Commander in Chief” forum on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton tried once again to put the email controversy behind her – and failed. Rather than take responsibility for her actions, Clinton came up with yet another excuse for why she did nothing wrong.
Hillary Clinton speaks at a presidential candidates “Commander-in-Chief” forum, moderated by Matt Lauer in New York, New York, September 7, 2016. REUTERS/Brian Snyder.
When asked about her emails by Matt Lauer, Clinton came up with this novel answer:
Classified material has a header which says “top secret,” “secret,” “confidential.” Nothing — and I will repeat this, and this is verified in the report by the Department of Justice — none of the e-mails sent or received by me had such a header.
She was then pressed by a combat veteran, Lieutenant Jon Lester, who asked her:
As a naval flight officer, I held a top secret sensitive compartmentalized information clearance. … Had I communicated this information not following prescribed protocols, I would have been prosecuted and imprisoned. Secretary Clinton, how can you expect those such as myself who were and are entrusted with America’s most sensitive information to have any confidence in your leadership as president when you clearly corrupted our national security?
She replied:
First, as I said to Matt, you know and I know classified material is designated. It is marked. There is a header so that there is no dispute at all that what is being communicated to or from someone who has that access is marked classified.
And what we have here is the use of an unclassified system by hundreds of people in our government to send information that was not marked, there were no headers, there was no statement, top secret, secret, or confidential….
So I did exactly what I should have done and I take it very seriously, always have, always will.
Then she told us there was nothing “marked classified” in her private emails (which the FBI says was also untrue).
Now she says “there were no headers” designating classified material.
Her new excuse raises more questions than it answers. For example: If there was classified information on her emails with “no headers,” how did it get there?
Answer: Either she or her staff put it there.
There is no way to “accidentally” send classified information by unclassified email.
There is no way to “accidentally” send classified information by unclassified email. Officials use separate computers for classified and unclassified information, and the classified system is not connected to the unclassified internet. You can’t forward something by mistake, or cut and paste it without realizing what you are doing. It requires … wait for it … intent.
So the only way for classified information without “headers” to make it onto her private email would be for someone to strip the headers off and put it there without any markings. According to the FBI, Clinton and/or her staff did this 110 times, including with Top Secret information.
So when she says there were “no headers” on the classified information on her unclassified private server that is not a defense – it is an admission of another security violation!
Every time Clinton comes up with a new excuse, she convinces more Americans that she is not honest or trustworthy.
Apparently Hillary Clinton has never learned the first rule of holes: when you are in one, stop digging.
The Eurozone's sustained rise in youth unemployment since 2008 threatens to create a 'lost generation'. This column presents evidence that this is, in part, an unintended consequence of pension reforms in southern Europe that locked in older workers. In future, reforms that create flexible retirement ages alongside variable pension levels could minimise the impact on youth unemployment without increasing the state's long-term pension liabilities.
Guest post by Kent Clizbe. Government employees willing to tell the truth about climate can be handsomely rewarded.
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The federal government has a vigorous program to identify and prosecute fraudulent grant applications and administration–the False Claims Act. It provides rewards for insiders who reveal grant fraud.
As detailed daily on Real Science, it is clear that there is wide-spread fraud in “climate research.”
“Climate research” is a complex operation with multiple international players. With the massive sums of Federal grants (Michael Mann’s website lists more than $50 million in grants for his research alone) involved, there is a huge incentive for tight lips.
Like the mafia, or other criminal conspiracies, there seems to be a code of silence in the “climate research” community.
A researcher, or aspiring researcher, who is aware of inside information detailing fraudulent activity, would need a considerable incentive to come forward.
Luckily, the False Claims Act provides that incentive.
Insiders with knowledge of fraud are empowered to share their knowledge, and to share in rewards. The reward can be as much as 30% of the total amount reclaimed.
If you have details of fraud in climate research you can share in the rewards paid when the grant funds are recovered.
According to an attorney who specializes in FCA cases against universities and government research offices, including Educational/Research Grant Fraud: “Many institutions receive grants, whether for research or educational purposes. When they lie to get the grant or keep the grant or if they use the funds for purposes outside the grant, they are liable under [this] program. There have been many grant cases brought by whistleblowers.”
Here are some examples of common education institution fraudulent acts:
Falsifying a grant application in order to secure a grant
Falsifying research data and results
Over-charging time, costs and other expenses associated with the grant
Falsifying purchase orders for equipment and materials
Using grant money for other unrelated research
Using grant money for personal expenses
Improper conflicts of interest by the principal investigators
Falsifying progress reports and other documentation
Failing to comply with applicable government safety and other regulations
If you know of anyone who might have details about fraudulent statements or actions by recipients of federal grant funds for climate research, please have them contact me immediately at the below email or cell phone.
All communications are completely confidential. They may want to consider using a third party email service (Yahoo, Hotmail, or other) instead of your work email to communicate. We will put you in contact with attorneys who specialize in False Claims Act suits. Your interests will be protected at all times.
Our country, and in fact, the entire world is counting on someone to stand up and tell the truth about climate research. The effects of moving forward with taxes and policies based on fraudulent science could potentially cripple the US economy and cost lives and jobs for generations.
I specialize in exposing frauds. See the article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine. It details my work that successfully exposed a 13 year, massively public fraud. Result: FBI arrested the fraudster, pled guilty, sentenced to prison.
Union membership varies wildly across high-income countries. In addition, there is a phenomenon of "collective bargaining coverage," often not familiar to American readers, which measures the share of workers who are covered by collective bargaining agreement, even though they are not union members. In the US, union density is almost the same as collective bargaining coverage. But in France, only 7.7% of workers are actual union members while 98% of workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements. Here are some facts on these patterns across high-income countries from the OECD publication called Economic Policy Reforms 2016: Going for Growth.
As a starter, here are figures showing the variation in the share of workers who are covered by a collective bargaining agreement (Panel A) and the share actually belonging to a union (Panel B). Just glancing at the figure should offer two lessons: 1) There's a lot of variation across countries; 2) Many of the coverage rate percentages are substantially higher than the union membership percentages; that is, in a lot of countries a large share of workers will find that their compensation is determined by collective bargaining, even though they are not a union member.
Here are some specific examples of the differences between union density and collective bargaining coverage, drawing from the OECD data:
Union Density and Collective Bargaining Coverage, 2013
Country
(abbreviation)
Union
Density (%)
Collective
Bargaining
Coverage (%)
United States (USA)
10.7%
11.9%
Japan (JPN)
17.6%
17.1%
Canada (CAN)
26.4%
29.0%
United Kingdom (GBR)
25.1%
29.5%
Germany (DEU)
18.1%
57.6%
Spain (ESP)
16.9%
77.6%
Italy (ITA)
37.3%
80.0%
Sweden (SWE)
67.3%
89.0%
France (FRA)
7.7%
98.0%
This blog post isn't the place to dissect unionization patterns around the world. But I'd offer a few thoughts:
1) US levels of union density and collective bargaining coverage are lower, and often considerably lower, than in other high-income countries.
2) It seems clear that the rules governing union formation and membership differ widely across countries, as do the rules by which many workers in many countries find that their compensation is collectively bargained. In many countries, union membership and collective bargaining are not at all the same thing.
3) What people think of when referring a "union" or a "collective bargaining agreement" will differ across countries, often in quite substantial ways. For example, the idea of not being in a union, but being covered by collective bargaining, seems strange to the Americans, Canadians and British, but common to the French, Spanish, Germans and Swedes. A union or a collective bargaining arrangement that represents a small share of the workforce can focus on its own members, and pay less attention to how its negotiations affect the broader labor force. A union or collective bargaining agreement that represents most workers will need to take a different perspective. The legal and traditional powers of unions vary substantially, too. Whenever referring to unions or collective bargaining, it's useful to be clear on what flavor of these arrangements you are describing.
4) The OECD countris are the high-income countries of the world, which in turn suggests that an array of union and collective bargaining agreements can be broadly compatible with a high-income economy. Any labor market tradeoffs that arise are from the specific details of the institutional structure and decisions made by these unions and collective bargaining agreements.
And self-published “indie” authors — in part because they get a much bigger cut of the revenue than authors working with conventional publishers do — are now making much more money from e-book sales, in aggregate, than authors at Big Five publishers.
And this:
The AAP also reported, though, that e-book revenue was down 11.3 percent in 2015 and unit sales down 9.7 percent. That’s where things get misleading. Yes, the established publishing companies that belong to the AAP are selling fewer e-books. But that does not mean fewer e-books are being sold. Of the top 10 books on Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list when I checked last week, only two (“The Light Between Oceans” and “The Girl on the Train,” both mass-market reissues of novels that have just been made into movies) were the products of major publishers. All the rest were genre novels (six romances, two thrillers) published either by the author or by an in-house Amazon imprint. Their prices ranged from 99 cents to $4.99.
Over Labor Day weekend, Chicago saw its 500th murder, making 2016 the city’s “deadliest year in two decades.” But just as stunning as the city’s high and rising rate of violent crime is the extraordinarily low rate at which perpetrators are arrested. As Lois Beckett reports in The Guardian, more than 96 percent of non-fatal shootings, and 84 percent of fatal ones, are going unresolved in the Windy City (based on back-of-the-envelope calculations, this comes out to a 94 percent non-arrest rate for all shootings, fatal and non-fatal):
As violence rises, an increasing number of shootings and murders are going unsolved. Through 28 August, the police department had only made arrests in 73 of the nearly 2,000 non-fatal shooting incidents so far this year – or just under 4%, according to a department spokesman.
The clearance rate for murders is not much better… Police have only made arrests in about 16% of fatal shootings through 28 August this year, according to a department spokesperson. Through June, the clearance rate for all murders was 22.2%. That’s lower than last year’s rate of 30.4%, and dramatically lower than the national average of 64.5%, according to the most recent available national FBI data.
Much ink has been spilled, and rightly so, about America’s “over-incarceration problem”—the fact that many people involved with America’s criminal justice system are put in prison for excessively long periods of time, thanks largely to overly-aggressive local prosecutors combined with a broken plea-bargaining system. But the shocking data out of Chicago highlight the fact that, as U.S. Senator Tom Cotton provocatively argued last year, America has an under-incarceration problem as well, to the extent that we fail to even apprehend the vast majority of violent suspects. In places like Chicago, low clearance rates contribute further to a sense of disorder and lawlessness, reduces communities’ trust in the police, and emboldens criminals even further.
How can America have an over-incarceration problem and an under-incarceration problem at the same time? The answer is, in part, that the American criminal justice system tends to be more aggressive than other countries when it comes to prison sentences, but less aggressive than other countries when it comes to hiring and deploying the police officers who bring suspects to court in the first place. As Alex Tabarrok has noted, the theory is that “an optimal punishment system combines a low probability of being punished with a harsh punishment if caught.”
The weight of the empirical evidence, however, points in the other direction: That our criminal justice system would be more effective at deterring crime if it emphasized swift and predictable punishment for a greater number of offenders—that is, a higher clearance rate in exchange for modestly shorter prison terms. So it is possible to support a re-invigoration of policing in places like Chicago while also favoring criminal justice reform measures that reduce sentences for non-violent offenders. As we’ve suggested before, criminal justice pragmatists might propose that the money saved from reduced prison populations and laid off prison guards should be re-directed toward hiring a larger force of police officers and detectives. Even a modest increase in the clearance rate could save the lives of hundreds of Chicagoans per year.
The above chart comes to us via a report from the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Goverment (h/t Bloomberg). It shows how unfunded pension liabilities, currently measured at $1.8 trillion, have trended as a percent of state and local government tax revenues.An irresistible force is approaching an immovable object…
NASA clearly does not agree with NASA, so which version is correct? A good way to check is by comparing the NASA data with satellites. Through the year 1999, NASA surface temperatures agreed with satellite temperatures – but have diverged sharply since then. NASA shows continued warming since the year 2000, but satellites show none.
This makes the post-2000 NASA data look very suspect. If we splice the satellite data on to the last reliable NASA surface temperatures from 1999, we see a total of 0.75C warming over the past 150 years – half of what NASA is currently showing for their entire data set.
Gavin claims that July 2016 “was absolutely the hottest month since the instrumental records began.”
The instrumental satellite record showed that Gavin was absolutely not telling the truth. July was nowhere near as warm as 1998 or 2010.
Gavin’s claims of record heat are simply not defensible. He is claiming records by tiny margins – which are much larger than the discrepancies with more accurate techniques.
I’m sure this post is wrong, but I’d be interested in finding out the precise way that it’s wrong.
I was recently looking at an international ranking of GDP/person in PPP terms, and noticed something strange. The per capita GDP for Saudi Arabia ($53,624) is higher than for Germany ($46,893).
I know what you are thinking: Oil, lots of oil. But is that the explanation?
The GDP for Saudi Arabia was $1,683 billion in 2015. As far as I can tell the Saudis produced about 10.25 million barrels of oil a day last year, or a total of roughly 3.75 billion barrels. Oil seemed to average about $50/barrel last year, for a total of about $187.5 billion in oil output. That means the non-oil sector of the Saudi economy produced about $1,495.5 worth of output. If we divide that number by the Saudi population (about 31.3 million in 2015) we get $47,780/person in output, even excluding the entire output of their oil industry. That’s more than Germany! These are all IMF figures, but the World Bank isn’t much different.
What did I miss?
1. I subtracted nominal oil output from total PPP GDP. That might seem like comparing apples and oranges, But oil is internationally traded, and I used international oil prices. So the oil sector needs no PPP adjustment.
2. Lots of Saudi output is produced by foreigners. Yes, but the 31.3m population figure includes foreigners.
3. Saudi non-oil output is only possible because the oil wealth finances it. So does that mean that if we give Bangladesh foreign aid equal to 12.5% of their GDP, they would be able to boost per capita output to German levels? I don’t think so.
4. The IMF’s PPP estimates are way, way off. But the other sources reports similar or even higher levels of Saudi GDP (PPP).
I vote for #4. But it still seems odd that multiple sources would produce similar numbers that are all wildly incorrect. If so, why? The IMF and the World Bank employ highly skilled economists. Wouldn’t that be a major scandal?
Or are Saudis actually more productive than Germans? If so, isn’t that a huge story?
In 1988 Frank Smith made an interesting observation. He realized that what children learned was not the result of formal instruction. A teacher, even a very good teacher, seemed to have limited influence on what was or was not picked-up by students: Two students could be in all the same classes and one might develop correct grammar while another might not.
So what caused one student to learn more or less than the other if they both had the same teachers? According to Smith, the students didn’t really learn through instruction or even conscious emulation. Instead, they acquired the characteristics of people they considered themselves to be like. It was this sense of “joining the club” that seemed to account for the students’ learning. So what really made the difference between whether Jayden or Olivia learned grammar was if the people they wanted to be like had learned grammar. It was the perceived identity of the child not the prowess of the teacher that made the biggest impact.
And this observation goes beyond grammar and beyond elementary school. Today, a professor’s success at influencing her students remains subject to the perceived identity of her students. One example, an important example to the direction of this article, is that even though 80% of professors are liberal, they tend to have a small influence on the political leanings of their students.
However, if what Smith observed is true, there would be one group of students that is dramatically influenced by their professors’ liberalism: the students who see themselves becoming professors.
This is one of the subtle dangers of political dominance in the academy. Because the academy often promotes from within itself, it will likely only become increasingly liberal. Without honestly addressing the issue, conservatism will continue to be filtered out.
Of course another common explanation is that conservatives are simply “closed-minded or money grubbing.” But, according to the authors of Passing on the Right, a book about conservative professors in progressive universities, that notion is not supported by the evidence. So how do people get these ideas? One possibility is that these ideas exist because people view knowledge acquisition like filling up a sand bucket. From this perspective knowledge exists like sand, and a teacher simply distributes it to the students. Voilá, mission accomplished. If students become liberal, it’s because the facts lean liberal.
But according to Smith’s theory of knowledge, a teacher doesn’t possess the knowledge but helps students access the knowledge through participation within a community. How learning happens is not by filling sand buckets, but by connecting students to authentic communities. In the end it is the students who can honestly see themselves as part of a community who will gain access to the knowledge within. Thus, knowledge is not like sand. Though it may feel robust, it is created by tiny silk threads connecting people. And currently almost all these silk threads are held by liberals.
In this sense, professors are not liberal because they have more knowledge, but because they have gained access to knowledge by being liberal.
Learning is a process of identity and the identity of learning never ends. It is even possible that the field of knowledge represented by the academy could have been conservative in nature. How do we know that it could have been different? Because it has been different.
According to Irving Babbitt, a professor at Harvard in the 1920s, the spirit of his time was “the positive and critical spirit, the spirit that refuses to take things on authority.” Sounds a lot like our contemporary sentiment, doesn’t it? However, there is one great difference. Irving Babbitt was a staunch conservative, as were many of the leading intellectuals of his day: T. S Eliot[1], Evelyn Waugh, Wallace Stevens, Alan Tate, etc.
To believe that smart people then just didn’t know as much as smart people now is an example of chronological snobbery—an assumption that because we have progressed in some things we have progressed in all things. While it may be true that if those scholars lived today they would be liberal, it is because liberalism is woven into the social fabric of knowledge currently on display at universities. It is not because it couldn’t be otherwise. It is the very fact that they would indeed be liberal (and that today’s professors could likely have been conservative if they lived then) that makes the whole point.
It is simply wrong to believe that professors tend to be liberal because professors are smarter than everyone else. No, that’s not it at all. It comes down to the same identity issues we’re all dealing with. That’s why all my English professors owned personal Mac laptops even though the only program they ever used was Word. Why, with a professor’s salary, would you pay an extra thousand dollars for a Mac when Word is native to windows?
The reason is simple: because owning a Mac says you’re serious. It says you’re cutting edge. It signals success. And besides, every other professor has one. For a professor, their computer contains their life work, encages their articles, brings to life their next book. They want it to look as important as it feels.
They’re not liberal because they’re smarter. No, it’s because they’re like everyone else.
[1] Eliot describes himself as a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglican in religion” in his introduction to Preface to For Lancelot Andrews (1928)
Opinions expressed are those of the author(s). Publication does not imply endorsement by Heterodox Academy or any of its members. We welcome your comments below. Feel free to challenge and disagree, but please try to model the sort of respectful and constructive criticism that makes viewpoint diversity most valuable. Comments that include obscenity or aggression are likely to be deleted.
http://i.redditmedia.com/W_WM_OuCdW2C9w7iopaaMBluObc2NpIzMkkZpxJAxUk.png?w=1024&s=f3594bd77bdfd45d63651a65368a661b
Does IRS only go after private citizens for this kind of “structuring”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring#Background
Structuring includes the act of parceling what would otherwise be a large financial transaction into a series of smaller transactions to avoid scrutiny by regulators or law enforcement. Structuring often appears in federal indictments related to money laundering, fraud, and other financial crimes.
“When the president does it, it’s not illegal.”
bonus: another famous case of progressive quote-mining…
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Nixon-say-When-the-President-does-it-that-means-that-it-is-not-illegal
Obama Admin Won’t Tell Congress How It Paid Iran $1.3 Billion
The State Department said it does not know how the remaining $1.3 billion was transferred or to whom it was transferred. Cruz described this disclosure as “confounding.”
“It is even more confounding that the State Department spokesman claimed Monday not to know how or to whom the residual $1.3 billion was transferred, although he does know the transaction happened,” Cruz said. “That kind of money doesn’t just transfer itself to a rogue regime still under heavy U.S. sanctions for its sponsorship of terrorism. Someone in our government must have the answers the American people deserve.”
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/obama-admin-wont-tell-congress-paid-iran-1-3-billion-taxpayer-funds/
Obama visits a federal prison commiserating with criminals. I visit schools to help keep kids from landing there.
Obama visits a federal prison commiserating with criminals. I visit schools to help keep kids from landing there. pic.twitter.com/YW6qyn0v9J
— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) August 24, 2016
The U.S. economy is a well-oiled machine fueled by voracious consumers with unprecedented access to cheap credit used to buy everything from McMansions to a $300 sofa. The Baby Boomer generation played a huge role in the credit-fueled economic expansion that has played out over the past several decades. The problem is that, like every generation preceeding them, Baby Boomers will also retire.
A few charts from a recent research report by Jan Hatzius of Goldman perfectly illustrate how Baby Boomers are on the cusp of transitioning from their peak earnings age into the largest population of retired citizens the U.S. has ever seen.
And, as would be expected, as people retire they tend to earn less, borrow less and spend less. The impact on an economy of an aging population can be devastating...just ask Japan.
But the problem with Baby Boomers retiring in the U.S. is not necessarily the fact that their incomes will decline which will necessarily lead them to borrow and spend less. The much larger issue is that retiring Baby Boomers will expose the many ponzi schemes that have festered in this country since the early 1930's when FDR ushered in the "New Deal" and social security. It is no secret that social security is insolvent (see our post entitled "Scathing New Report Shows Just How Bankrupt Social Security Really Is") as funds reserved for future generations are simply used to pay out current benefits. But social security isn't the only problem. Public and private pension funds are sitting on trillions of dollars of liabilities that retiring Baby Boomers are about to start collecting. The problem, of course, is that many of these funds are insolvent as well. Just last week we pointed out how the Dallas Police and Fire Retirement System was paying out $2.11 for every $1.00 they collected (see "Dallas Cops' Pension Fund Nears Insolvency In Wake Of Shady Real Estate Deals, FBI Raid").
Of course, slow-moving crises like these are rarely preemptively addressed. The political consequences of cutting social security or pension benefits are just too high for our elected officials. So we suspect the various ponzi schemes can continue to survive for a while longer by stealing from future generations to satisfy current claims but at some point reality will take hold. With Baby Boomers just on the verge of retiring in force we fear the beginning of the end is upon us.
…Earning a place in our community of scholars is no small achievement and we are delighted that you selected Chicago to continue your intellectual journey.
Once here you will discover that one of the University of Chicago’s defining characteristics is our commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression. … Members of our community are encouraged to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn, without fear of censorship. Civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us, and freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harass or threaten others. You will find that we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion, and even disagreement. At times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort.
Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own….
If you follow media coverage of America’s mass incarceration problem, you are likely to hear a lot about unscrupulous police officers, mandatory minimums, and drug laws. But you are unlikely to hear these two words that have probably played a larger role in producing the excesses of the American criminal justice system than anything else: plea coercion.
The number of criminal cases that actually go to trial in America is steadily dwindling. That’s because prosecutors have so much leverage during plea bargaining that most defendants take an offer—in particular, defendants who are held on bail, and who might need to wait in jail for months or even years before standing trial and facing an uncertain outcome.We reported last week on a study from Columbia showing that all things being equal, defendants in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia who were made to pay bail are much more likely to plead guilty. Since then, a separate study from researchers at Harvard, Princeton and Stanford has come out that reaches a similar conclusion:
Using data from administrative court and tax records, we find that being detained before trial significantly increases the probability of a conviction, primarily through an increase in guilty pleas. Pre-trial detention has no detectable effect on future crime, but decreases pre-trial crime and failures to appear in court. We also find suggestive evidence that pre-trial detention decreases formal sector employment and the receipt of employment- and tax-related government benefits. We argue that these results are consistent with (i) pre-trial detention weakening defendants’ bargaining position during plea negotiations, and (ii) a criminal conviction lowering defendants’ prospects in the formal labor market.
As the study notes, letting accused defendants go free before trial has drawbacks: It modestly increases the likelihood that they will miss court dates and be accused of a different crime before their trial. But it also allows them to enter plea negotiations on stronger footing, and increases the chance they will opt for a jury trial. And as we wrote earlier this year, “a world in which only single digit percentages of defendants get a full and fair trial doesn’t seem much like the America you learn about in civics class.”
Of course, bail remains a vital tool for judges, and some defendants are too dangerous to be let out before their trial, period. But there are ways we might be able to reform the pre-trial detention system so as to reduce the number of defendants who simply resign themselves to a guilty plea out of desperation since they can’t come up with the money to buy their temporary freedom. For example, the average amount of money bail assessed should be reduced (it has risen exponentially over the last several decades) and courts should experiment with ankle bracelets and home visits to monitor defendants rather than holding them in a jail cell before they have been convicted of a crime.The focus on policing and minimum sentences and drug laws in the public discourse is all well and good. But if they are serious about making our justice system more fair and less arbitrary, criminal justice reformers should devote more of their efforts to reforming what happens in the period after arrest and before sentencing. That’s an area where big progress can be made with relatively straightforward, and politically palatable reforms.
In 1950, roughly 1.9 million people lived in Detroit. Fewer than 700,000 are left there today. In the bankrupt, crime-ridden city, the government has largely lost the ability to provide the services it once promised. And so residents have taken to plowing streets, picking up trash, and maintaining public facilities on their own.
America is experiencing a bizarre disconnect between real and perceived danger when it comes to kids. But why?
